In 19332 I suggested a mechanism according to which charged particles could acquire cosmic ray energies by electromagnetic inductive action in the stars. The mechanism invoked the changing magnetic fields known to exist over large areas in the stars, and exemplified in their most obvious form in the magnetic fields associated with sunspots. The mechanism may also be applied to galactic magnet ic fields. While, in m y original paper, I used sunspots as an illustration, it was never my intent ion to imply tha t all cosmic rays came from the sun, nor indeed to imply tha t even the rays from the sun itself necessarily originated in the spots. The principal reason for invoking sunspots at all lay in the fact that , as has since been emphasized many times, there are grave difficulties in unders tanding how magnetic fields can change with t ime to any significant degree in large masses of highly conduct ing material, and in assuming a figure for the rate of change of magnetic field in my calculations, it was impor tant to avoid using a value greater than 2 X 10 -3 gauss per second, which rate of change is known to occur in sunspots and so is a permissible value for cosmological calculations of this kind. Criticisms of the betat ron mechanism have been made for the most par t on two bases. THE CRITICISM MADE BY ALYV~N