“Their form and appearance change with great rapidity, so that the motion can almost be seen with the eye. Sometimes they consist of pointed rays, diverging in all directions, like hedgehog-spines. Sometimes they look like flames; sometimes like sheaves of grain; sometimes like whirling water-spouts, capped with a great cloud; occasionally they present most exactly the appearance of jets of liquid fire, rising and falling in graceful parabolas; frequently they carry on their edges spirals like the volutes of an Ionic column; and continually they detach filaments which rise to a great elevation, gradually expanding and growing fainter as they ascend, until the eye loses them. There is no end to the number of curious and interesting appearances which they exhibit under varying circumstances. The velocity of the motions often exceeds a hundred miles a second, and sometimes, though very rarely, reaches two hundred miles.” In the case of the particular phenomenon recorded by Professor Young in the last illustration, Mr. Proctor, however, has calculated that the initial velocity probably exceeded five hundred miles a second, which, except for the resistance experienced by the sun’s own atmosphere, would have hurled the ejected matter into space entirely clear of the sun’s power to recall it, so that it would never return. It adds to our interest in these flames to know that they at least are connected with that up-rush of heated matter from the sun’s interior, forming a part of the circulation which maintains both the temperature of its surface and that radiation on which all terrestrial life depends. The flames, indeed, add of themselves little to the heat the sun sends us, but they are in this way the outward and visible signs of a constant process within, by which we live; and so far they seem to have a more immediate interest to us, though invisible, than the corona which surrounds them. But we must remember when we lift our eyes to the sun that this latter wonder is really there, whether man sees it or not, and that the cause of its existence is still unknown. We ask for its “object” perhaps with an unconscious assumption that the whole must have been in some way provided to subserve _our_ wants; but there is not as yet the slightest evidence connecting its existence with any human need or purpose, and as yet we have no knowledge that, in this sense, it exists to any “end” at all. “As the thought of man is widened with the process of the suns,” let us hope that we shall one day know more. III. THE SUN’S ENERGY.