Curiously enough in the nineteenth century, the sun was deemed uninhabitable.—Author, chap, xx., etc.
Hitherto I have refrained from much allusion to the great central world into which we have now entered, until I could offer some connected remarks in this chapter, and just before we enter personally upon the solar scenes. A thousand years ago it was the general scientific view that the sun could not possess life. Prior to that time the sun had been held by some to be peopled, but upon purely imaginative grounds, for the chief conditioning data were then unknown. The standing problem of the bright photosphere had not then been solved. The photosphere, as we now know, is the cross-electric outward emanation from the magneto-cross-electric current, which ever sweeps the solar surface, keeping that surface comparatively cool, and composing it, more or less, to dynamic equilibrium. The solar photosphere, in short, is, as it were, our own familiar "Aurora glory," intensified by cross-electric action upon a gigantic scale, and over-
