While we admit that the evidence in any single case is rarely so conclusive as in these; while we agree that the spot is not so much the cause of the change as the index of some other solar action which does cause it; and while we fully concede our present ignorance of the nature of this cause,--we cannot refuse to accept the cumulative evidence, of which a little has been submitted. It is only in rare cases that we can feel quite sure; and yet, in regard even to one of the more common and less conclusive ones, we may at least feel warranted in saying that if the reader forfeited a business engagement or missed an invitation to dinner through the failure of the telegraph or telephone on such an occasion as that of the 17th of November, 1882, the far-off sun-spot was not improbably connected with the cause. Probably we should all like to hear some at least equally positive conclusion about the weather also, and to learn that there was a likelihood of our being able to predict it for the next year, as the Signal Service now does for the next day; but there is at present no such likelihood. The study of the possible connection between sun-spots and the weather is, nevertheless, one that will always have great interest to many; for even if we set its scientific aim aside and consider it in its purely utilitarian aspect, it is evident that the knowledge how to predict whether coming harvests would be good or bad, would enable us to do for the whole world what Joseph’s prophetic vision of the seven good and seven barren years did for the land of Egypt, and confer a greater power on its discoverer than any sovereign now possesses. There is something to be said, then, for the cyclists; for if their zeal does sometimes outrun knowledge, their object is a worthy one, and their aims such as we can sympathize with, and of which none of us can say that there is any inherent impossibility in them, or that they may not conceivably yet lead to something. Let us not, then, treat the inquirer who tries to connect panics on ‘Change with sun-spots as a mere lunatic; for there is this amount of reason in his theory, that the panics, together with the general state of business, are connected in some obscure way with the good or bad harvests, and these again in some still obscurer way with changes in our sun. We may leave, then, this vision of forecasting the harvests and the markets of the world from a study of the sun, as one of the fair dreams for the future of our science. Perhaps the dream will one day be realized. Who knows? IV. THE SUN’S ENERGY (_Continued_).