and fifty miles) wide—­brighter, and closer together where the pillars had formerly stood, and rapidly ascending.  When I looked, some of them had already reached a height of nearly four minutes (100,000 miles); and while I watched them they arose with a motion almost perceptible to the eye, until, in ten minutes, the uppermost were more than 200,000 miles above the solar surface.  This was ascertained by careful measurements, the mean of three closely accordant determinations giving 210,000 miles as the extreme altitude attained.  I am particular in the statement, because, so far as I know, chromatospheric matter (red hydrogen in this case) has never before been observed at any altitude exceeding five minutes, or 135,000 miles.  The velocity of ascent, also—­one hundred and sixty-seven miles per second—­is considerably greater than anything hitherto recorded. * * * As the filaments arose, they gradually faded away like a dissolving cloud, and at a quarter past one only a few filmy wisps, with some brighter streamers low down near the chromatosphere, remained to mark the place.  But in the mean while the little ‘thunder-head’ before alluded to had grown and developed wonderfully into a mass of rolling and ever-changing flame, to speak according to appearances.  First, it was crowded down, as it were, along the solar surface; later, it arose almost pyramidally 50,000 miles in height; then [Page 88] its summit was drawn down into long filaments and threads, which were most curiously rolled backward and forward, like the volutes of an Ionic capital, and finally faded away, and by half-past two had vanished like the other.  The whole phenomenon suggested most forcibly the idea of an explosion under the great prominence, acting mainly upward, but also in all directions outward; and then, after an interval, followed by a corresponding in-rush.”

No language can convey nor mind conceive an idea of the fierce commotion we here contemplate.  If we call these movements hurricanes, we must remember that what we use as a figure moves but one hundred miles an hour, while these move one hundred miles a second.  Such storms of fire on earth, “coming down upon us from the north, would, in thirty seconds after they had crossed the St. Lawrence, be in the Gulf of Mexico, carrying with them the whole surface of the continent in a mass not simply of ruins but of glowing vapor, in which the vapors arising from the dissolution of the materials composing the cities of Boston, New York, and Chicago would be mixed in a single indistinguishable cloud.”  In the presence of these evident visions of an actual body in furious flame, we need hesitate no longer in accepting as true the words of St. Peter of the time “in which the [atmospheric] heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and the works that are therein, shall be burned up.”

This region of discontinuous flame below the corona is called the chromosphere.  Hydrogen is the principal material of its upper part; iron, magnesium, and other [Page 89] metals, some of them as yet unknown on earth, but having a record in the spectrum, in the denser parts below.  If these fierce fires are a part of the Sun, as they assuredly are, its diameter would be from 1,060,000 to 1,260,000 miles.