atmosphere of the sun consisting of the gases and vapours which form that of the earth, it is composed of several metals, among which have been detected hydrogen, sodium, magnesium, calcium, chromium, manganese, iron, nickel, cobalt, copper, zinc, and barium--twelve in all. Now of these some are more or less known to every one of our readers. Hydrogen, though a metal, always exists, so far as we know, as a gas, and constitutes from 40 to 50 per cent. of our coal gas; sodium is easily converted into a vapour or gas, so is zinc by a bright red heat, and every one of the above has been changed from the solid to the aeriform condition—some in the Bunsen-flame (obtained from coal-gas mixed with air), and the others by heat derived from electricity. It is in this condition of gas or vapour that these bodies exist in the sun. The sun, then, according to modern theory, is an enormouslyheated body, whose temperature is so high that in it some very refractory metals exist in the condition of vapour, or even of permanent gas. How does this notion differ from that held by our grandfathers and those who went before them? Mainly in this, that a hundred years ago it was difficult to separate the idea of a great source of heat from the quite distinct idea of combustion, of actual burning, in which fuel of some sort is required, in which there must be present some supporter of combustion (equivalent to oxygen or sulphur, or the like), and in which there must be rapid consumption of material, and consequently a swiftly approaching extinction of the fire. Accordingly when it was believed that the sun was a fire, estimates were not uncommon of the amount of coal that would be necessary to maintain a similar combustion, of the rate of cooling of the sun, and of the probable period of its extinction. Against all this there was a sufficient protest in the emphatic and suggestive phrase, " Elementary Fire," so applicable to the case of a body consisting of constituent elements like those of earth, whose intense heat, however caused, does not arise from combustion. Look back and you will find that there have been detected in the sun only twelve elements in the state of vapour, and remembering that we know upon earth above sixty elements, you will be ready to ask, "Why do we find so few as twelve? A chemist would at once answer : 1st. These twelve bodies are detected by certain lines in the solar spectrum, of which there are several hundreds, many of which are very faint, and have not yet been sufficiently examined; hence some elements may have escaped detection, among them perhaps oxygen, chlorine, and others. 2d. Some of the elements existing upon earth are found in exceedingly small quantity, so that the evidence of their presence in the sun would be very faint. 3d. Those which have been detected are among the lightest in nature when they are in a state of gas, the heaviest barium and copper weighing 68 times as much as hydrogen, while most of those which are undetected are heavier than these, the heaviest having 200 times the weight of hydrogen. Naturally the heaviest would lie lowest in the solar atmosphere, and there exists around the sun a screen which cuts off from our view all except the highest portions of the sea of vapours which surround the sun's body. And finally, some few elements are so refractory, need so high a temperature to change them into vapour, that they would scarcely present themselves to our notice in the sun. In thus accounting, provisionally, for the shortness of the list of elements whose presence in the sun has been ascertained, we have made one or two allusions which need a word or two of explanation. On a gas lustre hang prisms of clear glass. Some of these have unequal angles, one corner fitting exactly when applied to a corner of a square box: these may be rejected. But some of the prisms have all their three angles or corners alike. On looking through one of these at a narrow slit in a thin shutter (one of millboard will do) we see a beautiful band of vivid colours. This is the spectrum. Examine it; the experiment is worth trying. Observe, the slit had better be horizontal, and the millboard shutter need not cover the whole window; if it be two feet square it is large enough. If the slit be very narrow, and the observer stand at least eight or ten feet from the window, he will see two or three, or even more, black bands stretching across the spectrum, from left to right if the slit and prism are both held horizontally, from top to bottom if they be held vertically; these we call spectrum lines. You see two or three, or more. In an experiment just made the writer saw four readily enough, and succeeded in catching sight of a fifth; but by a fit arrangement of prisms and telescope it is easy to see many hundreds. This must suffice at present by way of explanation of an allusion which may perhaps be more fully treated of in a future article on the subject of light. We have also spoken of a screen which exists around the sun, high up in its atmosphere, which cuts off from our view all that intervenes between itself and the real body of the sun. This screen is what we see and call the sun, rents in it are observed as spots, and it is made up of long cloud-like bodies of enormous size, which we have described under the names of "ricegrains," "willow-leaves," and "straws." The minute interstices between these bodies, where they fail to touch or overlap one another, are called "pores," and when these clouds are upheaped one upon another, so as to rise much above their ordinary level, they appear to us with such increased brightness as to have won for themselves the name "faculæ," which we have already explained as meaning torches. The whole assemblage of these clouds, the screen, has been called the photosphere, or light-giving globe. I have as great a dislike of long words as any of my readers can have, but they will admit the use of the phrase "photospheric bodies" as a convenient abbreviation for the clause, " those bodies, cloud-like in form, which together constitute the great light-giving expanse which forms the light-giving envelope of the sun, and which completely surrounds, at an enormous distance, the real, intensely-heated body of the sun." Presuming that we have permission thus to abbreviate, we ask at once, "What are the photospheric bodies?" The answer deserves a paragraph. The sun is intensely heated, and its atmosphere shares this heat, but becomes colder and colder as the distance increases from the body of the sun. If there existed in the sun an abundance of any substance difficult of fusion, and with greater difficulty changed into vapour or gas, and if, at the same time, the temperature or heat of the sun were such as to effect these changes, we should have these things occurring: This body rising in vapour from the sun's real surface would float upwards, just as water vapour does in the earth's atmosphere, until it reached an altitude at which the corresponding temperature was not great enough to continue it in the state of vapour, then it would form cloud, and from the under surface of this cloud there would fall a continuous rain of this substance, which in turn would be changed into vapour, and, rising again, would in turn add to the cloud, which thus, though continually dissolving, would be as constantly renewed. Something exactly corresponding to this would be happening upon the earth at this day, were the body of the earth so hot as to preclude the continued existence of liquid water upon its surface. Is there such a body, such a substance as this in the sun? There is strong ground for believing that there is, and that this body is known among mortals as carbon, or in some of its differing forms, as diamond, graphite or plumbago, or charcoal, a body which is so difficult of fusion that even a rain-giving cloud of this material would have a brightness far beyond that of the electric light. Accordingly the electric light looked at with the sun behind it appears to be totally black. There is good reason for believing that this is the actual constitution of these photospheric bodies, and the true explanation of the sun's brightness. His streaming glory is all derived from heat, his brightness is but another manifestation of his "elemental fire," and the substance in which this change of manifestation takes place is the great light-giver of the universe. Our candles (of every kind), our beacon-fires, our domestic hearths, our lighthouses, our gas and our electric lamps, have their glow and their glory from the one fact, that they are hot and contain carbon, the light-giver. Remember, too, that in any true system of correspondences light and truth are exchangeable terms, and then observe how carbon lends itself to the recording and distribution of truth and light. The blackboard, coated with carbon paint, the best of teachers, or the burnt stick, the charcoal pencil, or that of blacklead (another form of carbon), with which every noble edifice has been planned, and every priceless work of art has been outlined; the carbon photograph, which alone fades not, and with unerring truthfulness copies and transmits the fading beauties of palace or picture, and perpetuates the varying expression of the face of man and of nature; the carbon ink in which, before the age of iron, men wrote and handed down to us the truth-lore of the ancients, or the lamp-black (still carbon) in which every form of truth is being lithographed and stereotyped and multiplied in thousands of copies,any one of these is sufficient to vindicate the claims of carbon to the name of light-giver, that is, of truth-teller. Does not this close physical correspondence between the two great uses of the element serve as an additional proof, were it needed, of the correspondence between truth and light? Asking pardon for this digression, we return to our central theme, the sun, and ask our readers to sum up results as far as we have gone. We never saw the actual sun; the central body may be solid or liquid, we do not know which, we only know that it is so intensely hot, without decay or waste by combustion, that we may regard it as the completest possible material realization of the idea of elemental fire; that it is surrounded with sphere after sphere of vapours, less and less intensely heated, among which is the carbon photosphere, where some of the heat begins to manifest itself mainly as light, and beyond which again there is a flame atmosphere containing the elements named above, the outmost portions of which are still visible when in total eclipse the whole body of the sun is hidden. The fear of trespassing on space so well occupied as that of the Intellectual Repository, precludes our speaking of the zodiacal light, a shining envelope which lies around all that we have named, and the recollection of which is the last preparation needed for the reading of the following passage, which, though brief, sums up the whole matter. “The nature and intensity of the Divine Love may be apprehended from comparison with the sun of the world, for-though it may appear incredible-the Divine Love is far more ardent than that sun, and therefore the Lord, as a sun, does not flow immediately into the heavens, but the ardency of His love is gradually tempered by mediums which appear like radiant belts around the sun." (H. H. 120.) Sun-spots are, as we have seen, openings made by some means through the photosphere, through which the lower regions of the solar atmosphere are seen, and even, say some, but this is doubtful,—actual glimpses of the body of the sun. It is not known what is the precise cause of these spots; Chacornac, a French astronomer, believes them to be caused by something like volcanic eruptions, but this view seems least tenable of all. The sun is revolving rapidly on his own axis, and this would cause him to have a larger diameter at his equator than from pole to pole, a difference which would certainly be visible in the form of his photosphere unless the atmospheric currents or winds are at once constant, regular, and strong; accordingly the photospheric bodies are seen to drift in definite directions with great velocity, proving that within his own sphere the sun is ever active, producing perpetual spiral or vertical currents. These may cause the occasional outbreaks of spots. And the influence of certain of the planets (Mercury, Venus, the Earth, and Jupiter) on the sun, or his influence on them, seems to cause the spots to be exceptionally numerous once every eleven years. Or they may be occasionally caused by the fall into the sun of bodies the nature of which is not absolutely known; they may be something like those meteors which we saw three or four years ago making glorious a November night. On two occasions in September 1859, and again on the 2d of October 1864, bodies have been seen to fall in upon the face of the sun. In the first case the velocity of the falling body was about 7000 miles per minute; it produced a vivid outburst of light far exceeding the ordinary radiance of our great luminary, and was attended by phenomena (on earth) which beautifully prove the extensiveness and magnitude of that sphere of activity of which the sun is the centre. Magnetic needles in all parts of the world were disturbed for many hours; telegraphs could in many places be worked without aid from their batteries; the electric disturbance was so great that telegraph clerks received shocks from their instruments; tongues of flame followed the pen of the recording telegraph, and some of the machines in, I believe, Norway, were set on fire; while in the northern and southern hemisphere alike, as the pall of light rolled round the earth for six-andthirty hours, its fringes were beautified by the aurora, whose dancing beams kept tunes with the quivering needle of the compass. Thus far have we attempted to set forth some of the main points of the physical system of the sun, believing that our writer will best be understood by those who have the most extensive acquaintance with facts, and that the science of correspondence is only possible as a science when we are prepared by a knowledge as wide and varied and complete as possible of the constitution of things. In laying down my pen, I trust that I have made somewhat plain the very difficult theme, and either that some abler than myself may indicate the points of contact between Swedenborg and modern science, and between science and theology, or that, feeling any abler, I may be permitted in a second and simpler paper, to attempt the completion of the work that is thus begun. W. B. B. MONOLOGUES. III. JUDAS. "Then Judas, which had betrayed Him, when he saw that He was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, I have sinned, in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went, and hanged himself.”—MATT. xxvii. 3-5. "CONDEMNED? Why, that I know. Who more than I? Weighed 'gainst the treasures of a King, whose realm Should stretch, as prophets teach, froni sea to sea? JAH be my witness, I thought not of gain! "O Christ! Why didst Thou dally with our hopes? Why pause Upon the very threshold of success; |