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of the Sun and fixed Stars. 
but what may be accounted for with the greatest facility, from 
the continual agitation which we may easily conceive must 
take place in the regions of such extensive elastic fluids. 
It will be necessary, however, to be a little more particular, 
as to the manner in which I suppose the lucid fluid of the sun 
to be generated in its atmosphere. An analogy that may be 
drawn from the generation of clouds in our own atmosphere, 
seems to be a very proper one, and full of instruction. Our 
clouds are probably decompositions of some of the elastic fluids 
of the atmosphere itself, when such natural causes, as in this 
grand chemical laboratory are generally at work, act upon 
them ; we may therefore admit that in the very extensive at- 
mosphere of the sun, from causes of the same nature, similar 
phsenomena will take place; but with this difference, that the 
continual and very extensive decompositions of the elastic fluids 
of the sun, are of a phosphoric nature, and attended with lucid 
appearances, by giving out light. 
If it should be objected, that such violent and unremitting 
decompositions would exhaust the sun, we may recur again 
to our analogy, which will furnish us with the following re- 
flections. The extent of our own atmosphere, we see, is still 
preserved, notwithstanding the copious decompositions of its 
fluids, in clouds and falling rain ; in flashes of lightning, in 
meteors,, and other luminous phagnomena ; because there are 
fresh supplies of elastic vapours, continually ascending to make 
good the waste occasioned by those decompositions. But it 
may be urged, that the case with the decomposition of the 
elastic fluids in the solar atmosphere would be very different, 
since light is emitted, and does not return to the sun, as clouds 
do to the earth when they descend in showers of rain. To 
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