242 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
could transmit the noise at the usual rapidity of 374 yards per second, the sound 
would necessitate some fourteen years to arrive tous. A train traveling at the 
rate of thirty-eight miles an hour, would require 266 years to reach the Sun. A 
vogager who left at that rate of traveling during the reign of James I., would on- 
ly be due at his destination to-day. 
The Sun is the source from which flows all the forces that put the earth and 
its life in motion, it is the Sun’s heat which causes the wind to blow, the clouds 
to rise, rivers to flow, forests to grow, fruit to ripen, and man himself to exist. 
This united force, constantly and silently, exercised to raise the resevoirs of rain 
to their mean atmospheric height, to fix carbon in plants, to give to terrestria] 
nature her vigor and her beauty, is estimated in a mechanical point of view, to 
be equal to 543 milliards of steam engines, of 400-horse power each, working day 
and night incessantly. It is the Sun’s heat which maintains matter in its three 
states, solid, liquid and gaseous. Examined through a powerful instrument, the 
surface of the sun appears to be covered with small grains of different forms, but 
where the oval predominates, the interstices which are very free, form a kind of 
gray net-work, the knots of this net-work enlarge sometimes as to form pores, 
which increasing still, give birth to a ‘‘spot.”” The luminous surface of the Sun 
has been called photosphere; it is not uniform but composed of a multitude of 
luminous points, disseminated on the somber net-work. These points or grains, 
produce the heat and light that we receive from the Sun, and occupy about one- 
fifth part of the surface of that star; if they approach closer to each other, multi- 
plying and condensing, the dark netting would disappear, the light would be 
increased from two to five fold, and the heat in proportion; were they on the 
contrary to diminish, light and heat would disappear, and the world expire from 
cold. We call flame and fire all that which burns, but the gases in the Sun’s 
atmosphere possess such an elevated degree of temperature that it is impossible 
for them to burn. Occasionally protuberances are visible round the sun; these 
are due to explosions of hydrogen, which shoot that gas upward at the rate of 
244,000 yards in a second; these eruptions continue during several hours, often 
days, motionless as immense luminous clouds, when they fall down in showers of 
liquid fire. These phenomena are hurricanes; now a hurricane of the greatest 
intensity on our planet, does not travel at a greater rate than 100 miles an four, 
the fire-hurricane travels that space in a second Vesuvius has entombed Pompeii 
and Herculaneum beneath its lavas. A solar eruption shooting up flames to the 
height of 63,000 miles in a few seconds, would bury our earth under its shower of 
fire, reducing terrestrial life to ashes in a shorter space of time than is required to 
read these lines. 
Messrs. Richet and Mourrut have conducted a series of experiments at Havre 
on digestion with fishes; with the latter, as in the case of other classes of vertebrata, 
there is a very great diversity in point of intensity of digestion; pending the pre-= 
cess of digestion, the stomach is very acid, and the contrary when the stomach is 
empty; the gastric liquid acts more powerfully the less it is pure; temperature 
