Even when “The Fuel of the Sun” was published I knew nothing of the American observations of the quadrangular figure of the corona, or should certainly have then quoted them, nor of the fact revealed by the Eclipse of December, 1870, that, “wherever on the solar disc a large group of prominences was seen on Mr. Seabroke’s map, there a corresponding bulging out of the corona was chronicled on Professor Watson’s drawing; and at the positions where no prominences presented themselves, there the bright portions of the corona extended to the smallest distances from the sun’s limb;” and that Mr. Brothers’s photographs _all_ show the corona extending much further towards the west than towards the east, the west being “the region richest in solar prominences.” I am sorry that the limits of this paper will not permit me to enter more fully into the bearings of the recent studies of the corona and the prominences upon my explanations of solar phenomena, especially as the differences between the inner and outer corona, which still appear to puzzle astronomers, are exactly what my explanation demands. I must make this the subject of a separate paper, and proceed at once to the next step of the general argument. Assuming that such ejections of solid matter are poured from the prominences, to what distances may they travel? In attempting to answer this question, I avowedly ventured upon dangerous ground, for at the time of writing I only knew that the force of upheaval of the prominences must be enormous, _probably_ sufficient to eject solid matter beyond the orbit of the earth and even beyond that of Mars. Actual measurements of the eruptive velocity of the solar prominences have since been made, and they are so great as to relieve me of my quantitative difficulty, and show that I was quite justified in the bold inference that these eruptions may account for the zodiacal light, the zones of meteors into which our earth is sometimes plunged, and even the outer zone of larger bodies, the asteroids. But how, the reader will ask, can such solids, ejected from the sun, acquire orbital paths around him? “We have been taught that the parabola is the necessary path of such ejections.” Mr. Proctor has evidently reasoned in this manner, for in last April number of “Fraser’s Magazine” he says that some of my ideas are “opposed to any known laws, physical or dynamical,” that “there is nothing absolutely incredible in the conception that masses of gaseous, liquid, or solid matter should be flung to a height exceeding manifold that of the loftiest of the colored prominences; whereas it is not only incredible, but impossible, that such matter should in any case come to circle in a closed orbit round the sun.”