Towards the close of the last century, one
Doctor Elliot was tried at the Old Bailey for
the murder of one Miss Boydell, in a fit of
jealous rage. His friends defended him,
successfully, on the plea of madness; they
brought before the jury certain writings, in
which the doctor maintained that the light
of the sun came from what he called a dense
and universal aurora; in short, an aurora
borealis, which entirely surrounded the mass
of the sun. He also endeavoured to prove
that the sun, in spite of the torrents of light
and heat which it unceasingly pours over the
planetary system, might still itself enjoy so
moderate a temperature at its actual surface
as to be habitable. A few years later, William
Herschell astonished the world by adopting
the criminal lunatic's ideas. He declared
that the matter which causes the sun to
shine is neither a liquid nor an elastic fluid,
but a stratum of phosphoric clouds floating
in the sun's transparent atmosphere. The
lower atmosphere is not luminous, but merely
reflects the light of the upper one. Arago,
by means of polariscopic experiments, has
furnished what is considered proof that the
luminous portion of the sun is of a gaseous
nature. Mr. Thomas Woods deduces, from
photographic results, the probability that the
nature of the sun is analogous to that of
flame, since their results are identical. Each
solar atmosphere, separated by a certain
interval, is endowed with independent
movements. The thickness of the atmospheres is
estimated at between two and three thousand
miles. Modern science, which has swept the
inhabitants of the moon into nothingness by
the ever increasing assurance that the moon
has no respirable atmosphere, has given
almost official authority to the fact that
organised beings dwell on the surface of the
sun, and exist unscorched by his ardent rays.

Buffon's cosmological theory, that a comet,
striking the sun obliquely, knocked off
splashes of igneous matter of various dimensions,
and so produced the planets and their
satellites, has long fallen into disrepute, and
at the present day has received its deathblow,
from the current belief that the mass
of a comet is next to nothing. To this
succeeded the hypothesis of Laplace, who
maintained that our whole solar system was
once a vast rotatory nebula, rarefied by excessive
heat, and whose limits reached beyond
the orbit of Neptune; that the planets
were formed by the process of cooling and
condensation, at the successively-outward
boundary of this fiery atmosphere, from
zones of vapour that were thrown off from
the plane of its equator as they gradually
hardened and contracted into smaller
dimensions. Buffon and Laplace agree on one
point; they both of them make the planets
proceed from the sun. Everyone is now of
the same opinion in that respect. Nobody
scarcely ventures to doubt that the earth is
of igneous origin; and the sun is the only
known source of heat in our system. But now,
a bold philosopher, M. Boutigny (d'Evreux),
who backs his theory by facts and experiments,
holds that the planets are the direct
and immediate offspring of the sun, without
the intervention of a blow from a comet, or a
condensation of the solar atmosphere. The
satellites, being the children of the planets,
are consequently the grandchildren of the
sun by lineal descent.

M. Boutigny considers the central sphere of
the sun as a body in the spheroidal state,
preserved from the action of its own blazing
atmosphere by the property which it
possesses of reflecting caloric. The entire sun
has a movement of rotation on its axis, and
every one of its atoms takes part in the same
movement. Independent of this motion, the
sun and every one of its molecules are
animated by the vibratory motion observed in
all bodies in the spheroidal state. And now,
let us not forget the enormous volume of the
sun,—so great, that all the planets and their
satellites put together scarcely make the six
hundred and fiftieth part of it. These points
laid down, what more is wanted to make the
planets to be born of the sun? Nothing but
vibrations of great force and amplitude, for
the projection of a portion ot the sun's own
substance beyond his incandescent or exterior
atmosphere. Of this nature are the volcanic
eruptions and the earthquakes on our own
globe, which are propagated by vibrations,
waves, or undulations. The sun having a
movement of rotation from west to east,
everything which proceeds from the sun
must have also a rotatory movement from
west to east, and, moreover, a motion of
progression in the same direction. The satellites
are also part and parcel of the sun, but
subsequently shot into space by the explosive
force of the planets around which they now
revolve. The moon, for instance, is the
daughter of the earth. Unless the tearing
up, and the projection of a portion of our
globe into open space be admitted, it is
impossible to explain satisfactorily the
hollowing-out of the basins which contain the
oceans; whilst it is naturally accounted for,
by admitting the projection of the forty-
ninth part (reckoning by bulk) of the earth's
substance, which cast-off portion now forms
the lunar sphere. Such explosions are
doubtless going on at the present day in
other worlds. When the explosions take
place in a direction which is not far from
perpendicular, the force which occasions
them is combined with the centrifugal force,
and the solar material may be projected in
masses sufficiently considerable, and to
distances sufficiently great to form the planets
of our system. On the other hand, when the
explosions shoot out their charge in either of
the other directions, the small masses which
alone can be projected beyond the limits of
the sun's blazing atmosphere, are thereby
destined to traverse the heavens in all directions,