I don't like their plan, said the Marchioness. You told me, the other day, that the different parts of the moon were named after learned men; I thought that very proper: as princes monopolize the earth, it is but fair that astronomers should have the sky for their share, and not suffer princes to intrude on their domain. Allow them, however, I replied, if territory should be wanting, to consign to them some planet, or some part of the moon. As to these spots on the sun, they can make no use of them; for instead of planets, we find they are only clouds of smoke or dross arising from the sun. Sometimes these clouds are greatly accumulated, sometimes we see little of them, and at other times they totally disappear. Sometimes a number of them are combined together, then they are separated into small parts; at one time they are very dark, at another they grow pale. It appears as if the sun was some kind of liquid; many people think it is melted gold, in a continual state of ebullition, producing impurities, which the rapidity of its motion casts up from the surface; they are afterwards consumed and others produced. Only think what amazing bodies these are. Some of them are seventeen hundred times[34] larger than the earth, for you must know, the earth is more than a million times smaller than the sun.[35] Imagine therefore what must be the quantity of this liquid gold, or the extent of this ocean of light and fire! [Footnote 34: The largest of the sun's spots are scarcely three times larger than the diameter of the earth, or twenty-seven times its bulk.] [Footnote 35: The earth is only a hundred, or to speak with more exactness, a hundred and eleven times, smaller.]