He first observed a number of the usual flame-prominences having the typical form which has been compared to a “banyan grove.” One of these banyans was greater than the rest. This monarch of the solar flame-forest measured _fifty-four thousand miles in height_, and its outspreading measured in one direction about _one hundred thousand miles_. It was a large eruption-flame, but others much larger have been observed, and Professor Young would probably have merely noted it among the rest, had not something further occurred. He was called away for twenty-five minutes, and when he returned “the whole thing had been literally blown to shreds by some inconceivable uprush from beneath.” The space around “was filled with flying _débris_—a mass of detached vertical fusiform filaments, each from 10 sec. to 30 sec. long by 2 sec. or 3 sec. wide, brighter and closer together where the pillars had formerly stood, _and rapidly ascending_.” Professor Young goes on to say, that “When I first looked, some of them had already reached a height of 100,000 miles, and while I watched they rose, with a motion almost perceptible to the eye, until in ten minutes the uppermost were 200,000 miles above the solar surface. This was ascertained by careful measurement.” Here, then, we have an observed velocity of 10,000 miles per minute, and this is the gaseous matter, merely the flash of the gun by which the particles of solidified solar matter are supposed to be projected. The reader must pause and reflect, in order to form an adequate conception of the magnitudes here treated—100,000 miles long and 54,000 miles high! What does this mean? Twelve and a half of our worlds placed side by side to measure the length, and six and three quarters, piled upon each other, to measure the height! A few hundred worlds as large as ours would be required to fill up the whole cubic contents of this flame-cloud. The spectroscope has shown that these prominences are incandescent hydrogen. Most of my readers have probably seen a soap-bubble or a bladder filled with the separated elements of water, and then exploded, and have felt the ringing in their ears that has followed the violent detonation. Let them struggle with the conception of such a bubble or bladder magnified to the dimensions of only one such a world as ours, and then exploded; let them strain their power of imagination even to the splitting point, and still they must fail most pitifully to picture the magnitude of this solar explosion observed on September 7th last, which flashed out to a magnitude of more than five hundred worlds, and then expanded to the size of more than five thousand worlds, even while Professor Young was watching it. Professor Young concludes his description by stating that “it seems far from impossible that the mysterious coronal streamers, if they turn out to be truly solar, as now seems likely, may find their origin and explanation in such events.”