The Montgomery advertiser., 1902-04-27

of death.
 But, an alteration is actually taking place!
 The change is periodical and gradual
 Its mavima recur in cycles of about clever years The underlying cause is no known. If there were no star but thu sun we should not have discovered tha it represents passing stage in solar ex istence.
 The ship of space that guides. light. and vivifies the earth has a fatal leak It will not founder in darkness during this voyage, nor the next-but sometims the end will be reached. The sunspots inexorably recurring like the strokes oi the hammer building the scaffold, fore tell the coming doom.
 The astronomer. studying the other suns that sprinkle the heavens. learns what periodical changes in their radiation mean. He finds some whose light is as yet steady and unvarying.
 He finds others in which the changes are slight, hardly noticeable in their ef- fects, like those of our sun. He finds many in whose neighborhood such life as ours would be impossible. They alter nately blaze and flicker. and no man can imagine what storms lash the ocean of either about those wild dynamos.
 The astronomer also finds many suns that have perished and are now only black hulks floating .as it were. fin space. drawn by the gravitation aliko of the liv- ing and the dead. as wrecks are swept by winds and sucked into eddies and cur rents of the ocean.
 It is the good fortune of the inhabi- tants of the earth that our sun has not yet advanced very far on this fateful way which leads to extinction. But it is surely going that way.
 The span of human life, or cen tury, is not long enough to reveal gem eral increase in the spottedness of the sun. The observation of a thousand years might not suffice to furnish con- elusive visual evidence of such progress. But 1t must be remembered that sun. spots have not yet ben systematically studied for even a hundred years.
 It Is only now that. with the aid of photography. we are beginning to be able to compare the spots of one period with those of the next. thus to determine whether d progressive change is visible or not.
 There is reason for thinking that about three times in century there Is an &C., centuation of the energies giving rise to sunspots. Once in about thirty-five years the solar disturbance is particularly violent. and 1t is thought by some that the effects can be detected in the earths atmosphere. The present return of the sunspots, according to this view, should be one of those in which the underlying energies are heightened. and spells of abnormal heat together with eccentric weather contrast should be looked for.
 Confessedly. however. the whole sub feet of the influence of sunspots upon the earth is an unsoved puzzle. But their significance as to the fate of the sun itself is just as important, in a large sense, as that of their connection with terrestrial meteorology.
 It seems a pretty large undertaking for pgmy man to scan the face of the distant sun in order 10 read therein the signs of the future dissolution of that .all-powerful orb-yet he can do it. and he does it. and his prognosti- cations are the voice of the oracle of science proclaiming that all must die, even suns. But still the sun of life An the universe does not diminish. for life and death are both processes which together constitute the grand cycle of existence.