460 The Fuel of the Sun, [October, 



If I am right in ascribing a gaseous condition to the sun 

 and the larger planets, and tracing the maintenance of this 

 condition to the disturbing gravitation of the attendant 

 planets or satellites, a solution of the riddle of the nebulas 

 at once presents itself. We have only to suppose a star 

 cluster or group composed of orbs of solar or great planetary 

 dimensions, and that these act mutually upon each other 

 as the planets on our sun, or the satellites upon Saturn, but 

 in a far more violent degree owing to the far greater relative 

 masses of the reacting orbs, and we obtain the conditions 

 under which great gaseous orbs would be not merely pitted 

 on their surface, but riven to their very centres, moulded 

 and shaped throughout by the whirling hurricane of their 

 whole substance. When thus in the centre of a tornado of 

 opposing gravitations the tortured orb would be twisted 

 bodily into a huge vorticose crater, into the bowels of which 

 the aqueous vapour would be dragged and dissociated, and 

 then, entangled with the inner matter of the riven sphere, 

 would be hurled upwards again to burst forth in an ex- 

 plosion of such magnitude that the original body would be 

 measurably presented as a mere appendage, the rocket 

 case of the flood of fire it had vomited forth. 



The reader must complete the picture. If he will take a 

 little trouble in doing so he will find that it becomes a 

 portrait of one or the other of the nebulas, according to the 

 kind of intergravitating star cluster from which he starts. 

 I have endeavoured to work out some of the details of the 

 nebular conditions in the 20th chapter. In chapter 21st I 

 have concluded by showing the analogy between a sun and 

 the hydro-electric machine, the sun being the cylinder and 

 the prominences the steam jets. If issuing jets of high- 

 pressure steam have the same properties at a distance of 

 91 millions of miles from the earth as upon its surface, the 

 body of the sun and the issuing steam must be in opposite 

 electrical conditions, and furious electrical excitation must 

 result ; and if the laws of electrical induction are constant 

 throughout the universe the earth must be as necessarily 

 subject to solar electrical influence as to his thermal radia- 

 tions. Thus the same reasoning which explains the origin 

 and maintenance of the solar heat and light, the sun spots, 

 the photosphere, the chromosphere, the sierra, the promi- 

 nences, the zodiacal light, the meteoric zones, the meteorology 

 of the planets, and the rings of Saturn also shows how the 

 electrical disturbances which produce the aurora borealis 

 and direct the needle may originate. 



Electrical theories of the corona and zodiacal light, 



