christened him Saxon; and the bells were rung;
and the heir to the great fortune was born at
last!

RESPECTING THE SUN.

HOWEVER clear the sun may have been at
noonday for ages past, his nature and constitution
are not even yet altogether clear to us.
What is he? How far off from us? Where
does he come from? Whither is he going? are
questions which still await a definite answer.
The sun is a statement with a very broad
margin.

His distance, which our school-books take for
granted to be exactly ninety-five millions of
miles, is open to a little correction of one
million of miles, more or less. Our present means
of measurement do not enable us to attain
greater precision; but in eighteen hundred and
seventy-four we shall have more accurate
information. The transit of Venus across the sun's
disk, which will take place in the course of that
year, will afford an opportunity of confirming or
correcting the figures that now tell us how far
it is from our family mansion to the sun.

The sun is enormous. His volume is not
quite one and a half million times that of the
earth. His density, on the other hand, is
comparatively inconsiderable, being not half as
much again as that of water; whereas Venus,
the Earth, and Mars, are from five to six times
as dense as water. Saturn, the lightest of all
the known planets, is only three-quarters as
heavy as water. Consequently, were he to fall
into an ocean like ours, he would float, rings
and all, like an enormous ball of cork. The
small weight of the sun, in proportion to his
size, is a fact to be carefully noted. He
revolves on his axis in twenty-five and a half of
our days; that space of time, therefore, is the
length of his day, if we can say that he has a day.

And where is he going to? The sun, with
his whole family of planets and satellites, is said
to be drifting, slowly but surely, in the direction
of the constellation Hercules. About his pace,
the learned differ. According to Argelander's
observations, he travels twice as fast as the
earth in her orbit. Other authorities give him
less velocity, stating that while the earth spins
along at the rate of nearly twenty miles per
second, the sun pursues his travels through
space at only five miles per second. Moreover,
the constellation Hercules is a very vague
port for us all to be bound to. We are anything
but sure that itself is a fixture. Hercules
may be coming to meet us, quite as rapidly as
we are advancing to shake hands with him. It
has been shrewdly asked, whether our sun is not
a satellite sun, revolving round a central sun of
whose existence we are not yet cognisant.
Stellar astronomy offers numerous examples of
stars performing their revolutions round other
stars which serve as their centre of motion.

Where does he come from? and what is he?
are two very closely connected questions.
Respecting the second, we are assured of one thing
—that it is the sun who gives life to all the
worlds around him, and who resembles none of
them; who, for the planets and the creatures
which dwell on them, is the principle of motion,
the source of warmth, the radiator of heat, perhaps
even the grand reservoir of ambient electricity.

From the remotest antiquity, the sun has
been considered a fire; but many have been the
disputes to determine whether that fire is pure
or gross, a self-sustaining fire, or one which needs
aliment; a perpetual fire, or one which may
go out. Anaxagoras regarded the sun as a
burning stone or a red hot iron; and he was
condemned to death by the clever Athenians
(which sentence was commuted to exile by
Pericles) for holding that the sun was as big as
the Peloponnesus! Some moralists have
supposed the sun-fire to be the place of torment for
the wicked. Kircher made out the sun to be
composed of the densest matter in the universe
—we now know the contrary to be the truth—and
that its mass formed an immense globe of molten
metal. It was also taken to be melted gold in
a constant state of ebullition. Huygens held
the sun to consist of incandescent matter, but
he felt uncertain whether that matter were solid
or liquid. Newton believed the sun to be a
solid opaque mass constantly emitting light and
heat from the mouths of innumerable volcanoes.
As a consequence, it might finally be exhausted
and become extinct.

Wilson, Arago, and the Herschels held that the
sun itself is not fire, but a black solid ball,
enclosed in a photosphere or luminous atmosphere
—several atmospheres, in fact, one within the
other—exactly as the yolk of an egg is surrounded
by the white, or the apple of a dumpling
by the crust. Sir John Herschel has even peopled
it with inhabitants, whose natural history will
one day amuse our great-grandchildren.

Fontenelle had gravely stated the reasons
why the sun has no inhabitants; which he
regrets as a great pity. For, as he says, there
is only one spot in the solar system where its
study would be perfectly simple and easy; and
just at that spot there is nobody living. All
things considered, he adds, if the sun be
inhabited, it can only be by blind people.

We might suppose that the solar salamander-
men, with their knowledge of the difference
between frying-pans and fires, must be more
than a match for the gentleman who used to
retire into a heated oven during his sulky
moments; but William Herschel insists on the
probability of the sun's nucleus enjoying quite
a temperate climate, in spite of the incandescence
of the upper atmosphere. Its inhabitants
would be protected from the insufferable light
and heat by the dense interior stratum of clouds,
which is endowed with very considerable
reflective power. The phenomenon of life might
be manifested there, as it is on the surface of
our globe; although, in all likelihood, it is
admitted, under very different forms and
conditions.

For this agreeable and benevolent theory,