Note 3 — THE FUEL OF THE SUN.

Since the publication of “The Fuel of the Sun,” Mr. Norman Lockyer has adopted this view of solar dissociation, and has gone so far as to suppose that it splits metals and other substances regarded by modern chemists as simple elements into more elementary and simple constituents. He assumes that the temperature of the solar atmosphere, growing higher at increasing depths, becomes somewhere capable of doing far greater dissociation work than that which separates the hydrogen of the prominences revealed by the spectroscope. In putting forth this “working hypothesis” he seems to have lost sight of the fact clearly proved by Deville’s experiments, that the temperature of dissociation rises with the pressure to which the compound is subjected, and thus that within the bowels of the sun the metals will be far less dissociable than they are on the surface of our earth.