In the meantime, observations showed the ‘corona’ to consist of clouds which were similar to terrestrial clouds, but most delicately coloured in tone and hue and ever changing, being driven about by the constant explosions and gaseous projections from the furnace beneath, these projections being of such appalling force that times without number a mere pencil of gas would rise with lightning speed for several millions of miles and strike the surface of an enormous cloud, miles in extent and depth, and this cloud, which they proved to contain fine particles of hitherto vaporous carbon of a rosy tint, would turn to a dazzling white in the twinkling of an eye, and the whole cloud would sometimes be reheated so fiercely as to become vaporous and rise bodily for millions of miles, till it became so cooled as to be more dense, when it sank again; at other times, or in other places, such a cloud would be disintegrated completely, dropping in miles of fire, which the glasses or spectrum showed to consist of minute metallic dust, now separated and falling in a white-hot shower, soon to be converted into vapour, proving most of the clouds to be, as it were, but bags of gas sufficiently buoyant to hold the metals in suspension at enormous heights till burst by ignition, or rendered more rarefied, when the heavier and more refractory elements, such as carbon, were free to fall by their own gravity. These clouds were of exquisite colour of extraordinary variety, according to the degree of heat of the particles contained in their mass and the colour which was reflected from the lower strata of similar clouds, the moving, terrible ‘flames’ roaring round them with repeated flashes of gleaming white, as some terrific explosion below burst all flames and clouds asunder, and allowed the fearful lurid heat of the photosphere to be reflected directly upwards through the atmosphere.