We have considered the hypothesis which bases the energy of our sun upon his inherent heat, upon combustion, upon the accretion of meteoric streams, and upon his slow and gradual condensation of volume; and have found that all these hypotheses, singly or combined, fail to account for his energy through the vistas of the past, during which we know he must have shone as he now shines, and fail to account for more than a slow but inevitable decline, in the relatively near future, into eternal darkness and death. We have found that all these theories are alike, in that they recognize the sun itself as the only source of his energy, that his enormous emission of light and heat is almost entirely wasted in empty space, and that this will go on with the same frightful waste until he has squandered his whole patrimony and ends his melancholy career in the poor-house or the dungeon. We have, however, seen that even this will not save the wretched client, for he has already spent far more than he ever could have received originally by inheritance, and far more than he could have gained by gifts pitched in in bulk--like the poor colored brother's potatoes--through the window. We have therefore gone over the case anew, and have learned that enormous electrical currents are constantly passing between the earth and the sun, with practically no resistance, and this irrespective of any hypothesis, actual or possible; and these facts have solved at the outset one of the greatest conceivable difficulties,--to wit, that of the transmission through space of such essential currents. Turning our attention to the more recent advances in electricity and the arts of electrical construction, we have found that induction machines, as contradistinguished from the older friction machines, operate in a manner strongly suggestive of the rotation of a planet through space, and we learn that the electrical potential of the air overhead increases constantly by an enormous multiplying number as we ascend, proving great electrical action in the regions immediately surrounding the earth, and which we have called the terrestrial electrosphere. We have also found that sun-spots and solar storms and other disturbances are at once reflected in our earth-currents, and are followed immediately by great electrical disturbances here and by extensive auroral displays at night. Experiment shows that similar auroral displays may be produced with an electrical machine by interruption of the current leading to its principal condenser, thus demonstrating that the currents are from the earth to the sun, and not the converse. We have also found that while the solar atmosphere is largely composed of hydrogen gas, that of the earth and other planets is largely composed of oxygen, and that these gases, the constituents of water, are separately disengaged at the opposite electrical poles by the electrolytic action of a powerful current of electricity