Dr. Braun indulges in somewhat startling numbers in temperature and pressure. He considers that the temperature of the sun, at the surface, may be from 40,000° to 100,000° C., and that it may reach to from ten to thirty million degrees at the centre. In this he may be right for anything we know to the contrary. When riding over a sandy desert, under an unclouded vertical sun, we could easily have believed anything of the central heat of such a fire, especially when we considered that it was at a distance of ninety-three millions of miles from us. But when he tells us that in the depths of the sun's interior the pressure reaches a maximum of two thousand millions of atmospheres, we "pull in resolution and begin to doubt." Air at that pressure would have a density 2,585,984 times that of water, or 456,887 times the mean density of the earth, and we should have a species of matter to ponder over, of which no physicist has ever as yet dreamt.
We have been able to study M. Faye's cosmogony in his work on "L'Origine du Monde," second edition of 1885, and can give a better account of it than of Dr. Braun's.
(1) He repudiates almost all existence of heat in the cosmic matter he is about to deal with, recognising that its temperature must have been very near the point of absolute zero, and also that its tenuity must have been almost inconceivable; so tenuous that a cubic miriamètre of it would not contain more perhaps than 5·217 grammes in weight. And very properly, we think, he looks upon the solar systems as having, at one time, formed a part of the whole universe, all of which was brought into existence, created, more or less, about the same time. In this universe, he considers that the stars have been formed, as well as the sun, by the progressive concentration of primitive materials disseminated in space, which conception gives rise to a totally new notion of the most positive character: viz. that each star owes to its mode of formation a provision of heat essentially limited; that it is not permissible, as Laplace thought he could do, to endow a sun with an indefinite amount of heat; and that what it has expended and what it still possesses, depend upon its volume and actual mass. And also that the primitive materials of the solar system were, at the beginning, part of a universal chaos from which they were afterwards separated, in virtue of movements previously impressed on the whole of the matter; and sums up his first ideas in the following manner or theorem: