Our readers will be interested in learping 'fioni a paper
in another column that a sun, constituted apparently of very much the same chemical substances as our own, has suddenly assumed a brilliance which implies an enormous addition to the intensity of its heat as well as its light, so that its planeta,—if it has any, and if they were previously to this conflagration the abodes of life, —are probably now undergoing combustion themselves, while the inhabitants have ceased to be. Will our sun imitate this freak, and in one of its great outbursts of hydrogen-flame scorch us suddenly to a cinder? Or may we hope that the planets of this confiagrating world had already so far cooled dowe. as to exclude the possibility of life, and that this sudden out- burst of new light and heat may rather restore past possibilities than extinguish new ones? At all events, our astronomers are now beholding one of the great catastrophes of a far-away world.
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