the real agency of whirlwinds in making them. I add some transcripts of my original pencil memoranda themselves, made with the eye at the telescope, which, though not at all finished drawings, may be trusted the more as being quite literal transcripts at first hand. [Illustration: FIG. 26.--SPOT OF OCT. 13, 1876. (FROM ORIGINAL DRAWING BY S. P. LANGLEY.)] Figs. 22 and 24, for instance, are two sketches of a little spot, showing what, with low powers, gives the appearance I have called the honeycomb structure, but which we see here to be due to whirls which have disposed the filaments in these remarkable forms. The first was drawn at eleven in the forenoon of March 31, 1875, the second at three in the afternoon of the same day. The scale of the drawing is fifteen thousand miles to the inch, and the changes in this little spot in these few hours imply a cataclysm compared with which the disappearance of the American continent from the earth’s surface would be a trifle. The very act of the solar whirlwind’s motion seemed to pass before my eyes in some of these sketches; for while drawing them as rapidly as possible, a new hole would be formed where there was none before, as if by a gigantic invisible auger boring downward. [Illustration: FIG. 27.--PHOTOGRAPH OF EDGE OF SUN. (BY PERMISSION OF WARREN DE LA RUE, LONDON.)] M. Faye, the distinguished French astronomer, believes that, owing to the fact that different zones of the sun rotate faster than others, whirlwinds analogous to our terrestrial cyclones, but on a vaster scale, are set in motion, and suck down the cooled vapors of the solar surface into its interior, to be heated and returned again, thus establishing a circulation which keeps the surface from cooling down. He points out that we should not conclude that these whirlwinds are not acting everywhere, merely because our bird’s-eye view does not always show them. We see that the spinning action of a whirlpool in water becomes more marked as we go below the surface, which is comparatively undisturbed, and we often see one whirl break up into several minor ones, but all sucking downward and never upward. According to M. Faye, something very like this takes place on the sun, and in Fig. 25 he gives this section to show what he believes to occur in the case of a spot which has “segmented,” or divided into two, like the one whose (imaginary) section is shown above it. This theory is to be considered in connection with such drawings as we have just shown, which are themselves, however, no way dependent on theory, but transcripts from Nature. I do not here either espouse or oppose the “cyclonic” theory, but it is hardly possible for any one who has been an eyewitness of such things to refuse to regard some such disturbance as a real and efficient cause in such instances as this.