Chapter II…

Chapter II

SOLAR OBSERVATIONS AND THEORIES

The zeal with which solar studies have been pursued during the last half century has already gone far to redeem the neglect of the two preceding ones. Since Schwabe's discovery was published in 1851, observers have multiplied, new facts have been rapidly accumulated, and the previous comparative quiescence of thought on the great subject of the constitution of the sun, has been replaced by a bewildering variety of speculations, conjectures, and more or less justifiable inferences. It is satisfactory to find this novel impulse not only shared, but to a large extent guided, by our countrymen.

William Rutter Dawes, one of many clergymen eminent in astronomy, observed, in 1852, with the help of a solar eye-piece of his own devising, some curious details of spot-structure.[405] The umbra--heretofore taken for the darkest part of the spot--was seen to be suffused with a mottled, nebulous illumination, in marked contrast with the striated appearance of the penumbra; while through this "cloudy stratum" a "black opening" permitted the eye to divine farther unfathomable depths beyond. The hole thus disclosed--evidently the true nucleus--was found to be present in all considerable, as well as in many small maculae.

Again, the whirling motions of some of these objects were noticed by him. The remarkable form of one sketched at Wateringbury, in Kent, January 17, 1852, gave him the means of detecting and measuring a rotatory movement of the whole spot round the black nucleus at the rate of 100 degrees in six days. "It appeared," he said, "as if some prodigious ascending force of a whirlwind character, in bursting through the cloudy stratum and the two higher and luminous strata, had given to the whole a movement resembling its own."[406] An interpretation founded, as is easily seen, on the Herschelian theory, then still in full credit.

An instance of the same kind was observed by Mr. W. R. Birt in 1860,[407] and cyclonic movements are now a recognised feature of sun-spots. They are, however, as Father Secchi[408] concluded from his long experience, but temporary and casual. Scarcely three per cent. of all spots visible exhibit the spiral structure which should invariably result if a conflict of opposing, or the friction of unequal, currents were essential, and not merely incidental to their origin. A whirlpool phase not unfrequently accompanies their formation, and may be renewed at periods of recrudescence or dissolution; but it is both partial and inconstant, sometimes affecting only one side of a spot, sometimes slackening gradually its movement in one direction, to resume it, after a brief pause, in the opposite. Persistent and uniform notions, such as the analogy of terrestrial storms would absolutely require, are not to be found. So that the "cyclonic theory" of sun-spots, suggested by Herschel in 1847,[409] and urged, from a different point of view, by Faye in 1872, may be said to have completely broken down.

The drift of spots over the sun's surface was first systematically investigated by Carrington, a self-constituted astronomer, gifted with the courage and the instinct of thoughtful labour.

Born at Chelsea in May, 1826, Richard Christopher Carrington entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1844. He was intended for the Church, but Professor Challis's lectures diverted him to astronomy, and he resolved, as soon as he had taken his degree, to prepare, with all possible diligence, to follow his new vocation. His father, who was a brewer on a large scale at Brentford, offered no opposition; ample means were at his disposal; nevertheless, he chose to serve an apprenticeship of three years as observer in the University of Durham, as though his sole object had been to earn a livelihood. He quitted the post only when he found that its restricted opportunities offered no farther prospect of self-improvement.

He now built an observatory of his own at Redhill in Surrey, with the design of completing Bessel's and Argelander's survey of the northern heavens by adding to it the circumpolar stars omitted from their view. This project, successfully carried out between 1854 and 1857, had another and still larger one superposed upon it before it had even begun to be executed. In 1852, while the Redhill Observatory was in course of erection, the discovery of the coincidence between the sun-spot and magnetic periods was announced. Carrington was profoundly interested, and devoted his enforced leisure to the examination of records, both written and depicted, of past solar observations. Struck with their fragmentary and inconsistent character, he resolved to "appropriate," as he said, by "close and methodical research," the eleven-year period next ensuing.[410] He calculated rightly that he should have the field pretty nearly to himself; for many reasons conspire to make public observatories slow in taking up new subjects, and amateurs with freedom to choose, and means to treat them effectually, were scarcer then than they are now.

The execution of this laborious task was commenced November 9, 1853. It was intended to be merely a parergon--a "second subject," upon which daylight energies might be spent, while the hours of night were reserved for cataloguing those stars that "are bereft of the baths of ocean." Its results, however, proved of the highest interest, although the vicissitudes of life barred the completion, in its full integrity, of the original design. By the death, in 1858, of the elder Carrington, the charge of the brewery devolved upon his son; and eventually absorbed so much of his care that it was found advisable to bring the solar observations to a premature close, on March 24, 1861.

His scientific life may be said to have closed with them. Attacked four years later with severe, and, in its results, permanent illness, he disposed of the Brentford business, and withdrew to Churt, near Farnham, in Surrey. There, in a lonely spot, on the top of a detached conical hill known as the "Devil's Jump," he built a second observatory, and erected an instrument which he was no longer able to use with pristine effectiveness; and there, November 27, 1875, he died of the rupture of a blood vessel on the brain, before he had completed his fiftieth year.[411]

His observations of sun-spots were of a geometrical character. They concerned positions and movements, leaving out of sight physical peculiarities. Indeed, the prudence with which he limited his task to what came strictly within the range of his powers to accomplish, was one of Carrington's most valuable qualities. The method of his observations, moreover, was chosen with the same practical sagacity as their objects. As early as 1847, Sir John Herschel had recommended the daily self-registration of sun-spots,[412] and he enforced the suggestion, with more immediate prospect of success, in 1854.[413] The art of celestial photography, however, was even then in a purely tentative stage, and Carrington wisely resolved to waste no time on dubious experiments, but employ the means of registration and measurement actually at his command. These were very simple, yet very effective. To the "helioscope" employed by Father Scheiner[414] two centuries and a quarter earlier, a species of micrometer was added. The image of the sun was projected upon a screen by means of a firmly-clamped telescope, in the focus of which were placed two cross-wires forming angles of 45 deg. with the meridian. The six instants were then carefully noted at which these were met by the edges of the disc as it traversed the screen, and by the nucleus of the spot to be measured.[415] A short process of calculation then gave the exact position of the spot as referred to the sun's centre.

From a series of 5,290 observations made in this way, together with a great number of accurate drawings, Carrington derived conclusions of great importance on each of the three points which he had proposed to himself to investigate. These were: the law of the sun's rotation, the existence and direction of systematic currents, and the distribution of spots on the solar surface.

Grave discrepancies were early perceived to exist between determinations of the sun's rotation by different observers. Galileo, with "comfortable generality," estimated the period at "about a lunar month";[416] Scheiner, at twenty-seven days.[417] Cassini, in 1678, made it 25.58; Delambre, in 1775, no more than twenty-five days. Later inquiries brought these divergences within no more tolerable limits. Laugier's result of 25.34 days--obtained in 1841--enjoyed the highest credit, yet it differed widely in one direction from that of Boehm (1852), giving 25.52 days, and in the other from that of Kysaeus (1846), giving 25.09 days. Now the cause of these variations was really obvious from the first, although for a long time strangely overlooked. Scheiner pointed out in 1630 that different spots gave different periods, adding the significant remark that one at a distance from the solar equator revolved more slowly than those nearer to it.[418] But the hint was wasted. For upwards of two centuries ideas on the subject were either retrograde or stationary. What were called the "proper motions" of spots were, however, recognised by Schroeter,[419] and utterly baffled Laugier,[420] who despaired of obtaining any concordant result as to the sun's rotation except by taking the mean of a number of discordant ones. At last, in 1855, a valuable course of observations made at Capo di Monte, Naples, in 1845-6, enabled C. H. F. Peters[421] to set in the clearest light the insecurity of determinations based on the assumption of fixity in objects plainly affected by movements uncertain both in amount and direction.

Such was the state of affairs when Carrington entered upon his task. Everything was in confusion; the most that could be said was that the confusion had come to be distinctly admitted and referred to its true source. What he discovered was this: that the sun, or at least the outer shell of the sun visible to us, has no single period of rotation, but drifts round, carrying the spots with it, at a rate continually accelerated from the poles to the equator. In other words, the time of axial revolution is shortest at the equator and lengthens with increase of latitude. Carrington devised a mathematical formula by which the rate or "law" of this lengthening was conveniently expressed; but it was a purely empirical one. It was a concise statement, but implied no physical interpretation. It summarised, but did not explain the facts. An assumed "mean period" for the solar rotation of 25.38 days (twenty-five days nine hours, very nearly), was thus found to be actually conformed to only in two parallels of solar latitude (14 deg. north and south), while the equatorial period was slightly less than twenty-five, and that of latitude 50 deg. rose to twenty-seven days and a half.[422] These curious results gave quite a new direction to ideas on solar physics.

The other two "elements" of the sun's rotation were also ascertained by Carrington with hitherto unattained precision. He fixed the inclination of its axis to the ecliptic at 82 deg. 45'; the longitude of the ascending node at 73 deg. 40' (for the epoch 1850 A.D.). These data--which have scarcely yet been improved upon--suffice to determine the position in space of the sun's equator. Its north pole is directed towards a star in the coils of the Dragon, midway between Vega and the Pole-star; its plane intersects that of the earth's orbit in such a way that our planet finds itself in the same level on or about the 3rd of June and the 5th of December, when any spots visible on the disc cross it in apparently straight lines. At other times, the paths pursued by them seem curved--downward (to an observer in the northern hemisphere) between June and December, upward between December and June.

A singular peculiarity in the distribution of sun-spots emerged from Carrington's studies at the time of the minimum of 1856. Two broad belts of the solar surface, as we have seen, are frequented by them, of which the limits may be put at 6 deg. and 35 deg. of north and south latitude. Individual equatorial spots are not uncommon, but nearer to the poles than 35 deg. they are a rare exception. Carrington observed--as an extreme instance--in July, 1858, one in south latitude 44 deg.; and Peters, in June, 1846, watched, during several days, a spot in 50 deg. 24' north latitude. But beyond this no true macula has ever been seen; for Lahire's reported observation of one in latitude 70 deg. is now believed to have had its place on the solar globe erroneously assigned; and the "veiled spots" described by Trouvelot in 1875[423] as occurring within 10 deg. of the pole can only be regarded as, at the most, the same kind of disturbance in an undeveloped form.

But the novelty of Carrington's observations consisted in the detection of certain changes in distribution concurrent with the progress of the eleven-year period. As the minimum approached, the spot-zones contracted towards the equator, and there finally vanished; then, as if by a fresh impulse, spots suddenly reappeared in high latitude, and spread downwards with the development of the new phase of activity. Scarcely had this remark been made public,[424] when Wolf[425] found a confirmation of its general truth in Boehm's observations during the years 1833-36; and a perfectly similar behaviour was noted both by Spoerer and Secchi at the minimum epoch of 1867. The ensuing period gave corresponding indications; and it may now be looked upon as established that the spot-zones close in towards the equator with the advance of each cycle, their activity culminating, as a rule, in a mean latitude of about 16 deg., and expiring when it is reduced to 6 deg. Before this happens, however, a completely new disturbance will have manifested itself some 35 deg. north and south of the equator, and will have begun to travel over the same course as its predecessor. Each series of sun-spots is thus, to some extent, overlapped by the succeeding one; so that while the average interval from one maximum to the next is eleven years, the period of each distinct wave of agitation is twelve or fourteen.[426] Curious evidence of the retarded character of the maximum of 1883-4 was to be found in the unusually low latitude of the spot-zones when it occurred. Their movement downward having gone on regularly while the crisis was postponed, its final symptoms were hence displaced locally as well as in time. The "law of zones" was duly obeyed at the minima of 1890[427] and 1901, and Spoerer found evidence of conformity to it so far back as 1619.[428] His researches, however, also showed that it was in abeyance during some seventy years previously to 1716, during which period sun-spots remained persistently scarce, and auroral displays were feeble and infrequent even in high northern latitudes. An unaccountable suspension of solar activity is, in fact, indicated.[429]

Gustav Spoerer, born at Berlin in 1822, began to observe sun-spots with the view of assigning the law of solar rotation in December, 1860. His assiduity and success with limited means attracted attention, and a Government endowment was procured for his little solar observatory at Anclam, in Pomerania, the Crown Prince (afterwards Emperor Frederick) adding a five-inch refractor to its modest equipment. Unaware of Carrington's discovery (not made known until January, 1859), he arrived at and published, in June, 1861,[430] a similar conclusion as to the equatorial quickening of the sun's movement on its axis. Appointed observer in the new Astrophysical establishment at Potsdam in 1874, he continued his sun-spot determinations there for twenty years, and died July 7, 1895.

The time had now evidently come for a fundamental revision of current notions respecting the nature of the sun. Herschel's theory of a cool, dark, habitable globe, surrounded by, and protected against, the radiations of a luminous and heat-giving envelope, was shattered by the first dicta of spectrum analysis. Traces of it may be found for a few years subsequent to 1859,[431] but they are obviously survivals from an earlier order of ideas, doomed to speedy extinction. It needs only a moment's consideration of the meaning at last found for the Fraunhofer lines to see the incompatibility of the new facts with the old conceptions. They implied not only the presence near the sun, as glowing vapours, of bodies highly refractory to heat, but that these glowing vapours formed the relatively cool envelope of a still hotter internal mass. Kirchhoff, accordingly, included in his great memoir "On the Solar Spectrum," read before the Berlin Academy of Sciences, July 11, 1861, an exposition of the views on the subject to which his memorable investigations had led him. They may be briefly summarised as follows:

Since the body of the sun gives a continuous spectrum, it must be either solid or liquid,[432] while the interruptions in its light prove it to be surrounded by a complex atmosphere of metallic vapours, somewhat cooler than itself. Spots are simply clouds due to local depressions of temperature, differing in no respect from terrestrial clouds except as regards the kinds of matter composing them. These sun-clouds take their origin in the zones of encounter between polar and equatorial currents in the solar atmosphere.

This explanation was liable to all the objections urged against the "cumulus theory" on the one hand, and the "trade-wind theory" on the other. Setting aside its propounder, it was consistently upheld perhaps by no man eminent in science except Spoerer; and his advocacy of it proved ineffective to secure its general adoption.

M. Faye, of the Paris Academy of Sciences, was the first to propose a coherent scheme of the solar constitution covering the whole range of new discovery. The fundamental ideas on the subject now in vogue here made their first connected appearance. Much, indeed, remained to be modified and corrected; but the transition was finally made from the old to the new order of thought. The essence of the change may be conveyed in a single sentence. The sun was thenceforth regarded, not as a mere heated body, or--still more remotely from the truth--as a cool body unaccountably spun round with a cocoon of fire, but as a vast heat-radiating machine. The terrestrial analogy was abandoned in one more particular besides that of temperature. The solar system of circulation, instead of being adapted, like that of the earth, to the distribution of heat received from without, was seen to be directed towards the transportation towards the surface of the heat contained within. Polar and equatorial currents, tending to a purely superficial equalisation of temperature, were replaced by vertical currents bringing up successive portions of the intensely heated interior mass, to contribute their share in turn to the radiation into space which might be called the proper function of a sun.

Faye's views, which were communicated to the Academy of Sciences, January 16, 1865,[433] were avowedly based on the anomalous mode of solar rotation discovered by Carrington. This may be regarded either as an acceleration increasing from the poles to the equator, or as a retardation increasing from the equator to the poles, according to the rate of revolution we choose to assume for the unseen nucleus. Faye preferred to consider it a retardation produced by ascending currents continually left behind as the sphere widened in which the matter composing them was forced to travel. He further supposed that the depth from which these vertical currents rose, and consequently the amount of retardation effected by their ascent to the surface, became progressively greater as the poles were approached, owing to the considerable flattening of the spheroidal surface from which they started;[434] but the adoption of this expedient has been shown to involve inadmissible consequences.

The extreme internal mobility betrayed by Carrington's and Spoerer's observations led to the inference that the matter composing the sun was mainly or wholly gaseous. This had already been suggested by Father Secchi[435] a year earlier, and by Sir John Herschel in April, 1864;[436] but it first obtained general currency through Faye's more elaborate presentation. A physical basis was afforded for the view by Cagniard de la Tour's experiments in 1822,[437] proving that, under conditions of great heat and pressure, the vaporous state was compatible with a very considerable density. The position was strengthened when Andrews showed, in 1869,[438] that above a fixed limit of temperature, varying for different bodies, true liquefaction is impossible, even though the pressure be so tremendous as to retain the gas within the same space that enclosed the liquid. The opinion that the mass of the sun is gaseous now commands a very general assent; although the gaseity admitted is of such a nature as to afford the consistence rather of honey or pitch than of the aeriform fluids with which we are familiar.

On another important point the course of subsequent thought was powerfully influenced by Faye's conclusions in 1865. Arago somewhat hastily inferred from experiments with the polariscope the wholly gaseous nature of the visible disc of the sun. Kirchhoff, on the contrary, believed (erroneously, as we now know) that the brilliant continuous spectrum derived from it proved it to be a white-hot solid or liquid. Herschel and Secchi[439] indicated a cloud-like structure as that which would best harmonise the whole of the evidence at command. The novelty introduced by Faye consisted in regarding the photosphere no longer "as a defined surface, in the mathematical sense, but as a limit to which, in the general fluid mass, ascending currents carry the physical or chemical phenomena of incandescence."[440] Uprushing floods of mixed vapours with strong affinities--say of calcium or sodium and oxygen--at last attain a region cool enough to permit their combination; a fine dust of solid or liquid compound particles (of lime or soda, for example) there collects into the photospheric clouds, and descending by its own weight in torrents of incandescent rain, is dissociated by the fierce heat below, and replaced by ascending and combining currents of similar constitution.

This first attempt to assign the part played in cosmical physics by chemical affinities was marked by the importation into the theory of the sun of the now familiar phrase dissociation. It is indeed tolerably certain that no such combinations as those contemplated by Faye occur at the photospheric level, since the temperature there must be enormously higher than would be needed to reduce all metallic earths and oxides; but molecular changes of some kind, dependent perhaps in part upon electrical conditions, in part upon the effects of radiation into space, most likely replace them. The conjecture was emitted by Dr. Johnstone Stoney in 1867[441] that the photospheric clouds are composed of carbon-particles precipitated from their mounting vapour just where the temperature is lowered by expansion and radiation to the boiling-point of that substance. But this view, though countenanced by Angstrom,[442] and advocated by Hastings of Baltimore,[443] and other authorities,[444] is open to grave objections.[445]

In Faye's theory, sun-spots were regarded as simply breaks in the photospheric clouds, where the rising currents had strength to tear them asunder. It followed that they were regions of increased heat--regions, in fact, where the temperature was too high to permit the occurrence of the precipitations to which the photosphere is due. Their obscurity was attributed, as in Dr. Brester's more recent Theorie du Soleil, to deficiency of emissive power. Yet here the verdict of the spectroscope is adverse and irreversible.

After every deduction, however, has been made, we still find that several ideas of permanent value were embodied in this comprehensive sketch of the solar constitution. The principal of these were; first, that the sun is a mainly gaseous body; secondly, that its stores of heat are rendered available at the surface by means of vertical convection-currents--by the bodily transport, that is to say, of intensely hot matter upward, and of comparatively cool matter downward; thirdly, that the photosphere is a surface of condensation, forming the limit set by the cold of space to this circulating process, and that a similar formation must attend, at a certain stage, the cooling of every cosmical body.

To Warren de la Rue belongs the honour of having obtained the earliest results of substantial value in celestial photography. What had been done previously was interesting in the way of promise, but much could not be claimed for it as actual performance. Some "pioneering experiments" were made by Dr. J. W. Draper of New York in 1840, resulting in the production of a few "moon-pictures" one inch in diameter;[446] but slight encouragement was derived from them, either to himself or others. Bond of Cambridge (U.S.), however, secured in 1850 with the Harvard 15-inch refractor that daguerreotype of the moon with which the career of extra-terrestrial photography may be said to have formally opened. It was shown in London at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and determined the direction of De la Rue's efforts. Yet it did little more than prove the art to be a possible one.

Warren de la Rue was born in Guernsey in 1815, and died in London April 19, 1889. Educated at the Ecole Sainte-Barbe in Paris, he made a large fortune as a paper manufacturer in England, and thus amply and early provided the material supplies for his scientific campaign. Towards the end of 1853 he took some successful lunar photographs. They were remarkable as the first examples of the application to astronomical light-painting of the collodion process, invented by Archer in 1851; and also of the use of reflectors (De la Rue's was one of thirteen inches, constructed by himself) for that kind of work. The absence of a driving apparatus was, however, very sensibly felt; the difficulty of moving the instrument by hand so as accurately to follow the moon's apparent motion being such as to cause the discontinuance of the experiments until 1857, when the want was supplied. De la Rue's new observatory, built in that year at Cranford, was expressly dedicated to celestial photography; and there he applied to the heavenly bodies the stereoscopic method of obtaining relief, and turned his attention to the delicate business of photographing the sun.

A solar daguerreotype was taken at Paris, April 2, 1845,[447] by Foucault and Fizeau, acting on a suggestion from Arago. But the attempt, though far from being unsuccessful, does not, at that time, seem to have been repeated. Its great difficulty consisted in the enormous light-power of the object to be represented, rendering an inconceivably short period of exposure indispensable, under pain of getting completely "burnt-up" plates. In 1857 De la Rue was commissioned by the Royal Society to construct an instrument specially adapted to the purpose for the Kew Observatory. The resulting "photoheliograph" may be described as a small telescope (of 3-1/2 inches aperture and 50 focus), with a plate-holder at the eye-end, guarded in front by a spring-slide, the rapid movement of which across the field of view secured for the sensitive plate a virtually instantaneous exposure. By its means the first solar light-pictures of real value were taken, and the autographic record of the solar condition recommended by Sir John Herschel was commenced and continued at Kew during fourteen years--1858-72. The work of photographing the sun is now carried on in every quarter of the globe, from Mauritius to Massachusetts, and the days are few indeed on which the self-betrayal of the camera can be evaded by our chief luminary. In the year 1883 the incorporation of Indian with Greenwich pictures afforded a record of the state of the solar surface on 340 days; and 364 were similarly provided for in 1897 and 1899.

The conclusions arrived at by photographic means at Kew were communicated to the Royal Society in a series of papers drawn up jointly by De la Rue, Balfour Stewart, and Benjamin Loewy, in 1865 and subsequent years. They influenced materially the progress of thought on the subject they were concerned with.

By its rotation the sun itself offers opportunities for bringing the stereoscope to bear upon it. Two pictures, taken at an interval of twenty-six minutes, show just the amount of difference needed to give, by their combination, the maximum effect of solidity.[448] De la Rue thus obtained, in 1861, a stereoscopic view of a sun-spot and surrounding faculae, representing the various parts in their true mutual relations. "I have ascertained in this way," he wrote,[449] "that the faculae occupy the highest portions of the sun's photosphere, the spots appearing like holes in the penumbrae, which appeared lower than the regions surrounding them; in one case, parts of the faculae were discovered to be sailing over a spot apparently at some considerable height above it." Thus Wilson's inference as to the depressed nature of spots received, after the lapse of not far from a century, proof of the most simple, direct, and convincing kind. A careful application of Wilson's own geometrical test gave results only a trifle less decisive. Of 694 spots observed, 78 per cent. showed, as they traversed the disc, the expected effects of perspective;[450] and their absence in the remaining 22 per cent. might be explained by internal commotions producing irregularities of structure. The absolute depth of spot-cavities--at least of their sloping sides--was determined by Father Secchi through measurement of the "parallax of profundity"[451]--that is, of apparent displacements attendant on the sun's rotation, due to depression below the sun's surface. He found that in every case it fell short of 4,000 miles, and averaged not more than 1,321, corresponding, on the terrestrial scale, to an excavation in the earth's crust of 1-1/5 miles. Of late, however, the reality of even this moderate amount of depression has been denied. Mr. Howlett's persevering observations, extending over a third of a century, the results of which were presented to the Royal Astronomical Society in December, 1894,[452] availed to shatter the consensus of opinion which had so long been maintained on the subject of spot-structure.[453] It has become impossible any longer to hold that it is uniformly cavernous; and what seem like actually protruding umbrae are occasionally vouched for on unimpeachable authority.[454] We can only infer that the forms of sun-spots are really more various than had been supposed; that they are peculiarly subject to disturbance; and that the level of the nuclei may rise and fall during the phases of commotion, like lavas within volcanic craters.

The opinion of the Kew observers as to the nature of such disturbances was strongly swayed by another curious result of the "statistical method" of inquiry. They found that of 1,137 instances of spots accompanied by faculae, 584 had those faculae chiefly or entirely on the left, 508 showed a nearly equal distribution, while 45 only had faculous appendages mainly on the right side.[455] Now the rotation of the sun, as we see it, is performed from left to right; so that the marked tendency of the faculae was a lagging one. This was easily accounted for by supposing the matter composing them to have been flung upwards from a considerable depth, whence it would reach the surface with the lesser absolute velocity belonging to a smaller circle of revolution, and would consequently fall behind the cavities or "spots" formed by its abstraction. An attempt, it is true, made by M. Wilsing at Potsdam in 1888[456] to determine the solar rotation from photographs of faculae had an outcome inconsistent with this view of their origin. They unexpectedly gave a uniform period. No trace of the retardation poleward from the equator, shown by the spots, could be detected in their movements. But the experiment was obviously inconclusive;[457] and M. Stratonoff's[458] repetition of it with ampler materials gave a full assurance that faculae rotate like spots in periods lengthening as latitude augments.

The ideas of M. Faye were, on two fundamental points, contradicated by the Kew investigators. He held spots to be regions of uprush and of heightened temperature; they believed their obscurity to be due to a downrush of comparatively cool vapours. Now M. Chacornac, observing, at Ville-Urbanne, March 6, 1865, saw floods of photospheric matter visibly precipitating themselves into the abyss opened by a great spot, and carrying with them small neighbouring maculae.[459] Similar instances were repeatedly noted by Father Secchi, who considered the existence of a kind of suction in spots to be quite beyond question.[460] The tendency in their vicinity, to put it otherwise, is centripetal, not centrifugal; and this alone seems to negative the supposition of a central uprush.

A fresh witness was by this time at hand. The application of the spectroscope to the direct examination of the sun's surface dates from March 4, 1866, when Sir Norman Lockyer (to give him his present title) undertook an inquiry into the cause of the darkening in spots.[461] It was made possible by the simple device of throwing upon the slit of the spectroscope an image of the sun, any part of which could be subjected to special scrutiny, instead of, as had hitherto been done, admitting rays from every portion of his surface indiscriminately. The answer to the inquiry was prompt and unmistakable, and was again, in this case, adverse to the French theorist's view. The obscurations in question were found to be produced by no deficiency of emissive power, but by an increase of absorptive action. The background of variegated light remains unchanged, but more of it is stopped by the interposition of a dense mass of relatively cool vapours. The spectrum of a sun-spot is crossed by the same set of multitudinous dark lines, with some minor differences, visible in the ordinary solar spectrum. We must then conclude that the same vapours (speaking generally) which are dispersed over the unbroken solar surface are accumulated in the umbral cavity, the compression incident to such accumulation being betrayed by the thickening of certain lines of absorption. But there is also a general absorption, extending almost continuously from one end of the spot-spectrum to the other. Using, however, a spectroscope of exceptionally high dispersive power, Professor Young of Princeton, New Jersey, succeeded in 1883 in "resolving" the supposed continuous obscurity of spot-spectra into a countless multitude of fine dark lines set very close together.[462] Their structure was seen still more perfectly, about five years later, by M. Duner,[463] Director of the Upsala Observatory, who traced besides some shadowy vestiges of the crowded doublets and triplets forming the array, from the spots on to the general solar surface. They cease to be separable in the blue part of the spectrum; and the ultra-violet radiations of spots show nothing distinctive.[464]

As to the movements of the constipated vapours forming spots, the spectroscope is also competent to supply information. The principle of the method by which it is procured will be explained farther on. Suffice it here to say that the transport, at any considerable velocity, to or from the eye of the gaseous material giving bright or dark lines, can be measured by the displacement of such lines from their previously known normal positions. In this way movements have been detected in or above spots of enormous rapidity, ranging up to 320 miles per second. But the result, so far, has been to negative the ascription to them of any systematic direction. Uprushes and downrushes are doubtless, as Father Cortie remarks,[465] "correlated phenomena in the production of a sun-spot"; but neither seem to predominate as part of its regular internal economy.

The same kind of spectroscopic evidence tells heavily against a theory of sun-spots started by Faye in 1872. He had been foremost in pointing out that the observations of Carrington and Spoerer absolutely forbade the supposition that any phenomenon at all resembling our trade-winds exists in the sun. They showed, indeed, that beyond the parallels of 20 deg. there is a general tendency in spots to a slow poleward displacement, while within that zone they incline to approach the equator; but their "proper movements" gave no evidence of uniformly flowing currents in latitude. The systematic drift of the photosphere is strictly a drift in longitude; its direction is everywhere parallel to the equator. This fact being once clearly recognised, the "solar tornado" hypothesis at once fell to pieces; but M. Faye[466] perceived another source of vorticose motion in the unequal rotating velocities of contiguous portions of the photosphere. The "pores" with which the whole surface of the sun is studded he took to be the smaller eddies resulting from these inequalities; the spots to be such eddies developed into whirlpools. It only needs to thrust a stick into a stream to produce the kind of effect designated. And it happens that the differences of angular movement adverted to attain a maximum just about the latitudes where spots are most frequent and conspicuous.

There are, however, grave difficulties in identifying the two kinds of phenomena. One (already mentioned) is the total absence of the regular swirling motion--in a direction contrary to that of the hands of a watch north of the solar equator, in the opposite sense south of it--which should impress itself upon every lineament of a sun-spot if the cause assigned were a primary producing, and not merely (as it possibly may be) a secondary determining one. The other, pointed out by Young,[467] is that the cause is inadequate to the effect. The difference of movement, or relative drift, supposed to occasion such prodigious disturbances, amounts, at the utmost, for two portions of the photosphere 123 miles apart, to about five yards a minute. Thus the friction of contiguous sections must be quite insignificant.

A view better justified by observation was urged by Secchi in and after the year 1872, and was presented in an improved form by Professor Young in his excellent little book on The Sun, published in 1882.[468] Spots are manifestly associated with violent eruptive action, giving rise to the faculae and prominences which usually garnish their borders. It is accordingly contended that upon the withdrawal of matter from below by the flinging up of a prominence must ensue a sinking-in of the surface, into which the partially cooled erupted vapours rush and settle, producing just the kind of darkening by increased absorption told of by the spectroscope. Round the edges of the cavity the rupture of the photospheric shell will form lines of weakness provocative of further eruptions, which will, in their turn, deepen and enlarge the cavity. The phenomenon thus tends to perpetuate itself, until equilibrium is at last restored by internal processes. A sun-spot might then be described as an inverted terrestrial volcano, in which the outbursts of heated matter take place on the borders instead of at the centre of the crater, while the cooled products gather in the centre instead of at the borders.

But on the earth, the solid crust forcibly represses the steam gathering beneath until it has accumulated strength for an explosion, while there is no such restraining power that we know of in the sun. Zoellner, indeed, adapted his theory of the solar constitution to the special purpose of procuring it; yet with very partial success, since almost every new fact has proved adverse to his assumptions. Volcanic action is essentially spasmodic. It implies habitual constraint varied by temporary outbreaks, inconceivable in a gaseous globe, such as we believe the sun to be.

If the "volcanic hypothesis" represented the truth, no spot could possibly appear without a precedent eruption. The real order of the phenomenon, however, is exceedingly difficult to ascertain; nor is it perhaps invariable. Although, in most cases, the "opening" shows first, that may be simply because it is more easily seen. According to Father Sidgreaves,[469] the disturbance has then already passed the incipient stage. He considers it indeed "highly probable that the preparatory sign of a new spot is always a small, bright patch of facula."

This sequence, if established, would be fatal to Lockyer's theory of sun-spots, communicated to the Royal Society, May 6, 1886,[470] and further developed some months later in his work on The Chemistry of the Sun. Spots are represented in it as incidental to a vast system of solar atmospheric circulation, starting with the polar out- and up-flows indicated by observations during some total eclipses, and eventuating in the plunge downward from great heights upon the photosphere of prodigious masses of condensed materials. From these falls result, primarily, spots; secondarily, through the answering uprushes in which chemical and mechanical forces co-operate, their girdles of flame-prominences. The evidence is, however, slight that such a circulatory flow as would be needed to maintain this supposed cycle of occurrences really prevails in the sun's atmosphere; and a similar objection applies to an "anticyclonic theory" (so to designate it) elaborated by Egon von Oppolzer in 1893.[471] August Schmidt's optical rationale of solar phenomena[472] was, on the other hand, a complete novelty, both in principle and development. Attractive to speculators from its recondite nature and far-reaching scope, it by no means commended itself to practical observers, intolerant of finding the all but palpable realities of their daily experience dealt with as illusory products of "circular refraction."

A singular circumstance has now to be recounted. On the 1st of September, 1859, while Carrington was engaged in his daily work of measuring the positions of sun-spots, he was startled by the sudden appearance of two patches of peculiarly intense light within the area of the largest group visible. His first idea was that a ray of unmitigated sunshine had penetrated the screen employed to reduce the brilliancy of the image; but, having quickly convinced himself to the contrary, he ran to summon an additional witness of an unmistakably remarkable occurrence. On his return he was disappointed to find the strange luminous outburst already on the wane; shortly afterwards the last trace vanished. Its entire duration was five minutes--from 11.18 to 11.23 A.M., Greenwich time; and during those five minutes it had traversed a space estimated at 35,000 miles! No perceptible change took place in the details of the group of spots visited by this transitory conflagration, which, it was accordingly inferred, took place at a considerable height above it.[473]

Carrington's account was precisely confirmed by an observation made at Highgate. Mr. R. Hodgson described the appearance seen by him as that "of a very brilliant star of light, much brighter than the sun's surface, most dazzling to the protected eye, illuminating the upper edges of the adjacent spots and streaks, not unlike in effect the edging of the clouds at sunset."[474]

This unique phenomenon seemed as if specially designed to accentuate the inference of a sympathetic relation between the earth and the sun. From the 28th of August to the 4th of September, 1859, a magnetic storm of unparalleled intensity, extent, and duration, was in progress over the entire globe. Telegraphic communication was everywhere interrupted--except, indeed, that it was, in some cases, found practicable to work the lines without batteries, by the agency of the earth-currents alone:[475] sparks issued from the wires; gorgeous aurorae draped the skies in solemn crimson over both hemispheres, and even within the tropics; the magnetic needle lost all trace of continuity in its movements, and darted to and fro as if stricken with inexplicable panic. The coincidence was drawn even closer. At the very instant[476] of the solar outburst witnessed by Carrington and Hodgson, the photographic apparatus at Kew registered a marked disturbance of all the three magnetic elements; while, shortly after the ensuing midnight, the electric agitation culminated, thrilling the earth with subtle vibrations, and lighting up the atmosphere from pole to pole with the coruscating splendours which, perhaps, dimly recall the times when our ancient planet itself shone as a star.

Here then, at least, the sun was--in Professor Balfour Stewart's phrase--"taken in the act"[477] of stirring up terrestrial commotions. Nor have instances since been wanting of an indubitable connection between outbreaks of individual spots and magnetic disturbances. Four such were registered in 1882; and symptoms of the same kind, including the beautiful "Rose Aurora," marked the progress across the sun of the enormous spot-group of February, 1892--the largest ever recorded at Greenwich. This extraordinary formation, which covered about 1/300 of the sun's disc, survived through five complete rotations.[478] It was remarkable for a persistent drift in latitude, its place altering progressively from 17 deg. to 30 deg. south of the solar equator.

Again, the central passage of an enormous spot on September 9, 1898, synchronised with a sharp magnetic disturbance and brilliant aurora;[479] and the coincidence was substantially repeated in March, 1899,[480] when it was emphasised by the prevalent cosmic calm. The theory of the connection is indeed far from clear. Lord Kelvin, in 1892,[481] pronounced against the possibility of any direct magnetic action by the sun upon the earth, on the ground of its involving an extravagant output of energy; but the fact is unquestionable that--in Professor Bigelow's words--"abnormal agitations affect the sun and the earth as a whole and at the same time."[482]

The nearer approach to the event of September 1, 1859, was photographically observed by Professor George E. Hale at Chicago, July 15, 1892.[483] An active spot in the southern hemisphere was the scene of this curiously sudden manifestation. During an interval of 12m. between two successive exposures, a bridge of dazzling light was found to have spanned the boundary-line dividing the twin-nuclei of the spot; and these, after another 27m., were themselves almost obliterated by an overflow of far-spreading brilliancy. Yet two hours later, no trace of the outburst remained, the spot and its attendant faculae remaining just as they had been previously to its occurrence. Unlike that seen by Carrington, it was accompanied by no exceptional magnetic phenomena, although a "storm" set in next day.[484] Possibly a terrestrial analogue to the former might be discovered in the "auroral beam" which traversed the heavens during a vivid display of polar lights, November 17, 1882, and shared, there is every reason to believe, their electrical origin and character.[485]

Meantime M. Rudolf Wolf, transferred to the direction of the Zurich Observatory, where he died, December 6, 1893, had relaxed none of his zeal in the investigation of sun-spot periodicity. A laborious revision of the entire subject with the aid of fresh materials led him, in 1859,[486] to the conclusion that while the mean period differed little from that arrived at in 1852 of 11.11 years, very considerable fluctuations on either side of that mean were rather the rule than the exception. Indeed, the phrase "sun-spot period" must be understood as fitting very loosely the great fact it is taken to represent; so loosely, that the interval between two maxima may rise to sixteen and a half or sink below seven and a half years.[487] In 1861[488] Wolf showed, and the remark was fully confirmed at Kew, that the shortest periods brought the most acute crises, and vice versa; as if for each wave of disturbance a strictly equal amount of energy were available, which might spend itself lavishly and rapidly, or slowly and parsimoniously, but could in no case be exceeded. The further inclusion of recurring solar commotions within a cycle of fifty-five and a half years was simultaneously pointed out; and Hermann Fritz showed soon afterwards that the aurora borealis is subject to an identical double periodicity.[489] The same inquirer has more recently detected both for aurorae and sun-spots a "secular period" of 222 years,[490] and the Kew observations indicate for the latter, oscillations accomplished within twenty-six and twenty-four days,[491] depending, most likely, upon the rotation of the sun. This is certainly reflected in magnetic, and perhaps in auroral periodicity. The more closely, in fact, spot-fluctuations are looked into, the more complex they prove. Maxima of one order are superposed upon, or in part neutralised by, maxima of another order;[492] originating causes are masked by modifying causes; the larger waves of the commotion are indented with minor undulations, and these again crisped with tiny ripples, while the whole rises and falls with the swell of the great secular wave, scarcely perceptible in its progress because so vast in scale.

The idea that solar maculation depends in some way upon the position of the planets occurred to Galileo in 1612.[493] It has been industriously sifted by a whole bevy of modern solar physicists. Wolf in 1859[494] found reason to believe that the eleven-year curve is determined by the action of Jupiter, modified by that of Saturn, and diversified by influences proceeding from the earth and Venus. Its tempting approach to agreement with Jupiter's period of revolution round the sun, indeed, irresistibly suggested a causal connection; yet it does not seem that the most skilful "coaxing" of figures can bring about a fundamental harmony. Carrington pointed out in 1863, that while, during eight successive periods, from 1770 downwards, there were approximate coincidences between Jupiter's aphelion passages and sun-spot maxima, the relation had been almost exactly reversed in the two periods preceding that date;[495] and Wolf himself finally concluded that the Jovian origin must be abandoned.[496] M. Duponchel's[497] prediction, nevertheless, of an abnormal retardation of the maximum due in 1881 through certain peculiarities in the positions of Uranus and Neptune about the time it fell due, was partially verified by the event, since, after an abortive phase of agitation in April, 1882, the final outburst was postponed to January, 1894. The interval was thus 13.5 instead of 11.1 years; and it is noticeable that the delay affected chiefly the southern hemisphere. Alternations of activity in the solar hemispheres were indeed a marked feature of the maximum of 1884, which, in M. Faye's view,[498] derived thence its indecisive character, while sharp, strong crises arise with the simultaneous advance of agitation north and south of the solar equator. The curve of magnetic disturbance followed with its usual strict fidelity the anomalous fluctuations of the sun-spot curve. The ensuing minimum occurred early in 1889, and was succeeded in 1894 by a maximum slightly less feeble than its predecessor.[499]

It cannot be said that much progress has been made towards the disclosure of the cause, or causes, of the sun-spot cycle. No external influence adequate to the effect has, at any rate, yet been pointed out. Most thinkers on this difficult subject provide a quasi-explanation of the periodicity in question through certain assumed vicissitudes affecting internal processes;[500] Sir Norman Lockyer and E. von Oppolzer reach the same end by establishing self-compensatory fluctuations in the solar atmospheric circulation; Dr. Schuster resorts to changes in the electrical conductivity of space near the sun.[501] In all these theories, however, the course of transition is arbitrarily arranged to suit a period, which imposes itself as a fact peremptorily claiming admittance, while obstinately defying explanation.

The question so much discussed, as to the influence of sun-spots on weather, does not admit of a satisfactory answer. The facts of meteorology are too complex for easy or certain classification. Effects owning dependence on one cause often wear the livery of another; the meaning of observed particulars may be inverted by situation; and yet it is only by the collection and collocation of particulars that we can hope to reach any general law. There is, however, a good deal of evidence to support the opinion--the grounds for which were primarily derived from the labours of Dr. Meldrum at Mauritius--that increased rainfall and atmospheric agitation attend spot-maxima; while Herschel's conjecture of a more copious emission of light and heat about the same epochs has recently obtained some countenance from Savelieff's measures showing a gain in the strength of the sun's radiation pari passu with increase in the number of spots visible on his surface.[502]

The examination of what we may call the texture of the sun's surface derived new interest from a remarkable announcement made by Mr. James Nasmyth in 1862.[503] He had made (as he supposed) the discovery that the entire luminous stratum of the sun is composed of a multitude of elongated shining objects on a darker background, shaped much like willow-leaves, of vast size, crossing each other in all possible directions, and possessed of unceasing relative motions. A lively controversy ensued. In England and abroad the most powerful telescopes were directed to a scrutiny encompassed with varied difficulties. Mr. Dawes was especially emphatic in declaring that Nasmyth's "willow-leaves" were nothing more than the "nodules" of Sir William Herschel seen under a misleading aspect of uniformity; and there is little doubt that he was right. It is, nevertheless, admitted that something of the kind may be seen in the penumbrae and "bridges" of spots, presenting an appearance compared by Dawes himself in 1852 to that of a piece of coarse straw-thatching left untrimmed at the edges.[504]

The term "granulated," suggested by Dawes in 1864,[505] best describes the mottled aspect of the solar disc as shown by modern telescopes and cameras. The grains, or rather the "floccules," with which it is thickly strewn, have been resolved by Langley, under exceptionally favourable conditions, into "granules" not above 100 miles in diameter; and from these relatively minute elements, composing, jointly, about one-fifth of the visible photosphere,[506] he estimates that three-quarters of the entire light of the sun are derived.[507] Janssen agrees, so far as to say that if the whole surface were as bright as its brightest parts, its luminous emission would be ten to twenty times greater than it actually is.[508]

The rapid changes in the forms of these solar cloud-summits are beautifully shown in the marvellous photographs taken by Janssen at Meudon, with exposures reduced at times to 1/100000 of a second! By their means, also, the curious phenomenon known as the reseau photospherique has been made evident.[509] This consists in the diffusion over the entire disc of fleeting blurred patches, separated by a reticulation of sharply-outlined and regularly-arranged granules. The imperfect definition in the smudged areas may be due to agitations in the solar or terrestrial atmosphere, unless it be--as Dr. Schemer thinks possible[510]--merely a photographic effect. M. Janssen considers that the photospheric cloudlets change their shape and character with the progress of the sun-spot period;[511] but this is as yet uncertain.

The "grains," or more brilliant parts of the photosphere, are now generally held to represent the upper termination of ascending and condensing currents, while the darker interstices (Herschel's "pores") mark the positions of descending cooler ones. In the penumbrae of spots, the glowing streams rushing up from the tremendous sub-solar furnace are bent sideways by the powerful indraught, so as to change their vertical for a nearly horizontal motion, and are thus taken, as it were, in flank by the eye, instead of being seen end-on in mamelon-form. This gives a plausible explanation of the channelled structure of penumbrae which suggested the comparison to a rude thatch. Accepting this theory as in the main correct, we perceive that the very same circulatory process which, in its spasms of activity, gives rise to spots, produces in its regular course the singular "marbled" appearance, for the recording of which we are no longer at the mercy of the fugitive or delusive impressions of the human retina. And precisely this circulatory process it is which gives to our great luminary its permance as a sun, or warming and illuminating body.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 405: Mem. R. A. S., vol. xxi., p. 157.]

[Footnote 406: Ibid., p. 160.]

[Footnote 407: Month. Not., vol. xxi., p. 144.]

[Footnote 408: Le Soleil, t. i., pp. 87-90 (2nd ed., 1871).]

[Footnote 409: See ante, p. 58.]

[Footnote 410: Observations at Redhill (1863), Introduction.]

[Footnote 411: Month. Not., vol. xxxvi., p. 142.]

[Footnote 412: Cape Observations, p. 435, note.]

[Footnote 413: Month. Not., vol. x., p. 158.]

[Footnote 414: Rosa Ursina, lib. iii., p. 348.]

[Footnote 415: Observations at Redhill, p. 8.]

[Footnote 416: Op., t. iii., p. 402.]

[Footnote 417: Rosa Ursina, lib. iv., p. 601. Both Galileo and Scheiner spoke of the apparent or "synodical" period, which is about one and a third days longer than the true or "sidereal" one. The difference is caused by the revolution of the earth in its orbit in the same direction with the sun's rotation on its axis.]

[Footnote 418: Rosa Ursina, lib. iii., p. 260.]

[Footnote 419: Faye, Comptes Rendus, t. lx., p. 818.]

[Footnote 420: Ibid., t. xii., p. 648.]

[Footnote 421: Proc. Am. Ass. Adv. of Science, 1885, p. 85.]

[Footnote 422: Observations at Redhill, p. 221.]

[Footnote 423: Am. Jour. of Science, vol. xi., p. 169.]

[Footnote 424: Month. Not., vol. xix., p. 1.]

[Footnote 425: Vierteljahrsschrift der Naturfors. Gesellschaft (Zurich), 1859, p. 252.]

[Footnote 426: Lockyer, Chemistry of the Sun, p. 428.]

[Footnote 427: Maunder, Knowledge, vol. xv., p. 130.]

[Footnote 428: Month. Mon., vol. l., p. 251.]

[Footnote 429: Maunder, Knowledge, vol. xvii., p. 173.]

[Footnote 430: Astr. Nach., No. 1,315.]

[Footnote 431: As late as 1866 an elaborate treatise in its support was written by F. Coyteux, entitled Qu'est-ce que le Soleil? Peut-il etre habite? and answering the question in the affirmative.]

[Footnote 432: The subsequent researches of Pluecker, Frankland, Wuellner, and others, showed that gases strongly compressed give an absolutely unbroken spectrum.]

[Footnote 433: Comptes Rendus, t. lx., pp. 89, 138.]

[Footnote 434: Ibid., t. c., p. 595.]

[Footnote 435: Bull. Meteor. dell Osservatorio dell Coll. Rom., Jan. 1, 1864, p. 4.]

[Footnote 436: Quart. Jour. of Science, vol. i., p. 222.]

[Footnote 437: Ann. de Chim. et de Phys., t. xxii., p. 127.]

[Footnote 438: Phil. Trans., vol. clix., p. 575.]

[Footnote 439: Les Mondes, Dec. 22, 1864, p. 707.]

[Footnote 440: Comptes Rendus, t. lx., p. 147.]

[Footnote 441: Proc. Roy. Society, vol. xvi., p. 29.]

[Footnote 442: Recherches sur le Spectre Solaire, p. 38.]

[Footnote 443: Am. Jour. of Science, 1881, vol. xxi., p. 41. Hastings stipulated only for some member of the triad, carbon, silicon, and boron.]

[Footnote 444: Ranyard, Knowledge, vol. xvi., p. 190.]

[Footnote 445: Young, The Sun, p. 337, ed. 1897.]

[Footnote 446: H. Draper, Quart. Journ. of Sc., vol. i., p. 381; also Phil. Mag., vol. xvii., 1840, p. 222.]

[Footnote 447: Reproduced in Arago's Popular Astronomy, plate xii., vol. 1.]

[Footnote 448: Report Brit. Ass., 1859, p. 148.]

[Footnote 449: Phil. Trans., vol. clii., p. 407.]

[Footnote 450: Researches in Solar Physics, part i., p. 20.]

[Footnote 451: Both the phrase and the method were suggested by Faye, who estimated the average depth of the luminous sheath of spots at 2,160 miles. Comptes Rendus, t. lxi., p. 1082; t. xcvi., p. 356.]

[Footnote 452: Month. Not., vol. lv., p. 74.]

[Footnote 453: Sidgreaves, Ibid., p. 282; Cortie, Ibid., vol. lviii., p. 91.]

[Footnote 454: Explained by East as refraction-effects. _Jour. Brit. Astr. Ass._, vol. viii., p. 187.]

[Footnote 455: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xiv., p. 39.]

[Footnote 456: Potsdam Publicationen, No. 18; Astr. Nach., Nos. 3,000, 3,287.]

[Footnote 457: Faye, Comptes Rendus, t. cxi., p. 77; Belopolsky, Astr. Nach., No. 2,991.]

[Footnote 458: Ibid., Nos. 3,275, 3,344.]

[Footnote 459: Lockyer, Contributions to Solar Physics, p. 70.]

[Footnote 460: Le Soleil, p. 87.]

[Footnote 461: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xv., p. 256.]

[Footnote 462: Phil. Mag., vol. xvi., p. 460.]

[Footnote 463: Recherches sur la Rotation du Soleil, p. 12.]

[Footnote 464: Hale, Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., p. 814.]

[Footnote 465: Jour. Brit. Astr. Ass., vol. i., p. 177.]

[Footnote 466: Comptes Rendus, t. lxxv., p. 1664; Revue Scientifique, t. v., p. 359 (1883). Mr. Herbert Spencer had already (in The Reader, Feb. 25, 1865) put forward an opinion that spots were of the nature of "cyclonic clouds."]

[Footnote 467: The Sun, p. 174. For Faye's answer to the objection, see Comptes Rendus, t. xcv., p. 1310.]

[Footnote 468: A revised edition appeared in 1897.]

[Footnote 469: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xii., p. 832.]

[Footnote 470: Proc. Roy. Soc., No. 244.]

[Footnote 471: Astr. Nach., No. 3,146; Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xii., pp. 419, 736.]

[Footnote 472: Sirius, Sept., 1893; ibid., vol. xxiii., p. 97; Astrophy. Jour., vol. i., p. 112 (Wilczynski), p. 178 (Keeler); vol. ii., p. 73 (Hale).]

[Footnote 473: Month. Not., vol. xx., p. 13.]

[Footnote 474: Ibid., p. 15.]

[Footnote 475: Am. Jour., vol. xxix. (2nd series), pp. 94, 95.]

[Footnote 476: The magnetic disturbance took place at 11.15 A.M., three minutes before the solar blaze compelled the attention of Carrington.]

[Footnote 477: Phil. Trans., vol. cli., p. 428.]

[Footnote 478: Maunder, Journal Brit. Astr. Ass., vol. ii., p. 386; Miss E. Brown, Ibid., p. 210; Month. Not., vol. lii., p. 354.]

[Footnote 479: Observatory, vol. xxi., p. 387; Maunder, Knowledge, vol. xxi., p. 228; Fenyi, Astroph. Jour., vol. x., p. 333.]

[Footnote 480: Ibid., p. 336; W. Anderson, Observatory, vol. xxii., p. 196.]

[Footnote 481: Proc. Roy. Society, vol. lii., p. 307; Rev. W. Sidgreaves, Mem. R. A. S., vol. liv., p. 85.]

[Footnote 482: Report on Solar and Terrestrial Magnetism, Washington, 1898, p. 27.]

[Footnote 483: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., p. 611.]

[Footnote 484: Ibid., p. 819 (Sidgreaves).]

[Footnote 485: See J. Rand Capron, Phil. Mag., vol. xv., p. 318.]

[Footnote 486: Mittheilungen ueber die Sonnenflecken, No. ix., Vierteljahrsschrift der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zurich, Jahrgang 4.]

[Footnote 487: Mitth., No. lii., p. 58 (1881).]

[Footnote 488: Ibid., No. xii., p. 192. Baxendell, of Manchester, reached independently a similar conclusion. See Month. Not., vol. xxi., p. 141.]

[Footnote 489: Wolf, Mitth., No. xv., p. 107, etc. Olmsted, following Hansteen, had already, in 1856, sought to establish an auroral period of sixty-five years. Smithsonian Contributions, vol. viii., p. 37.]

[Footnote 490: Hahn, Ueber die Reziehungen der Sonnenfleckenperiode zu meteorologischen Erscheinungen, p. 99 (1877).]

[Footnote 491: Report Brit. Ass., 1881, p. 518; 1883, p. 418.]

[Footnote 492: The Rev. A. Cortie (Month. Not., vol. lx., p. 538) detects the influence of a short subsidiary cycle, Dr. W. J. S. Lockyer that of a thirty-five year period (Nature, June 20, 1901). Professor Newcomb (Astroph. Jour., vol. xiii., p. 11) considers that solar activity oscillates uniformly in 11.13 years, with superposed periodic variations.]

[Footnote 493: Opere, t. iii., p. 412.]

[Footnote 494: Mitth., Nos. vii. and xviii.]

[Footnote 495: Observations at Redhill, p. 248.]

[Footnote 496: Comptes Rendus, t. xcv., p. 1249.]

[Footnote 497: Ibid., t. xciii., p. 827; t. xcvi., p. 1418.]

[Footnote 498: Ibid., t. c, p. 593.]

[Footnote 499: Ellis, Proc. Roy. Society, vol. lxiii., p. 70.]

[Footnote 500: Schultz, Astr. Nach., Nos. 2,817-18, 2,847-8; Wilsing, Ibid., No. 3,039; Belopolsky, Ibid., No. 2,722.]

[Footnote 501: Report Brit. Ass., 1892, p. 635.]

[Footnote 502: A. W. Augur, Astroph. Jour., vol. xiii., p. 346.]

[Footnote 503: Report Brit. Ass., 1862, p. 16 (pt. ii.).]

[Footnote 504: Mem. R. A. S., vol. xxi., p. 161.]

[Footnote 505: Month. Not., vol. xxiv., p. 162.]

[Footnote 506: Am. Jour. of Science, vol. vii., 1874, p. 92.]

[Footnote 507: Young, The Sun, p. 103.]

[Footnote 508: Ann. Bur. Long., 1879, p. 679.]

[Footnote 509: Ibid., 1878, p. 689.]

[Footnote 510: Himmelsphotographie, p. 273.]

[Footnote 511: Ranyard, Knowledge, vols. xiv., p. 14, xvi., p. 189; see also the accompanying photographs.]

Chapter III

RECENT SOLAR ECLIPSES

By observations made during a series of five remarkable eclipses, comprised within a period of eleven years, knowledge of the solar surroundings was advanced nearly to its present stage. Each of these events brought with it a fresh disclosure of a definite and unmistakable character. We will now briefly review this orderly sequence of discovery.

Photography was first systematically applied to solve the problems presented by the eclipsed sun, July 18, 1860. It is true that a daguerreotype,[512] taken by Berkowski with the Koenigsberg heliometer during the eclipse of 1851, is still valuable as a record of the corona of that year; and some subsequent attempts were made to register partial phases of solar occultation, notably by Professor Bartlett at West Point in 1854;[513] but the ground remained practically unbroken until 1860.

In that year the track of totality crossed Spain, and thither, accordingly, Warren de la Rue transported his photo-heliograph, and Father Secchi his six-inch Cauchoix refractor. The question then primarily at issue was that relating to the nature of the red protuberances. Although, as already stated, the evidence collected in 1851 gave a reasonable certainty of their connection with the sun, objectors were not silenced; and when the side of incredulity was supported by so considerable an authority as M. Faye, it was impossible to treat it with contempt. Two crucial tests were available. If it could be shown that the fantastic shapes suspended above the edge of the dark moon were seen under an identical aspect from two distant stations, that fact alone would annihilate the theory of optical illusion or "mirage"; while the certainty that they were progressively concealed by the advancing moon on one side, and uncovered on the other, would effectually detach them from dependence on our satellite, and establish them as solar appendages.

Now both these tests were eminently capable of being applied by photography. But the difficulty arose that nothing was known as to the chemical power of the rosy prominence-light, while everything depended on its right estimation. A shot had to be fired, as it were, in the dark. It was a matter of some surprise, and of no small congratulation, that, in both cases, the shot took effect.

De la Rue occupied a station at Rivabellosa, in the Upper Ebro valley; Secchi set up his instrument at Desierto de las Palmas, about 250 miles to the south-east, overlooking the Mediterranean. From the totally eclipsed sun, with its strange garland of flames, each observer derived several perfectly successful impressions, which were found, on comparison, to agree in the most minute details. This at once settled the fundamental question as to the substantial reality of these objects; while their solar character was demonstrated by the passage of the moon in front of them, indisputably attested by pictures taken at successive stages of the eclipse. That forms seeming to defy all laws of equilibrium were, nevertheless, not wholly evanescent, appeared from their identity at an interval of seven minutes, during which the lunar shadow was in transit from one station to the other; and the singular energy of their actinic rays was shown by the record on the sensitive plates of some prominences invisible in the telescope. Moreover, photographic evidence strongly confirmed the inference--previously drawn by Grant and others, and now with fuller assurance by Secchi--that an uninterrupted stratum of prominence-matter encompasses the sun on all sides, forming a reservoir from which gigantic jets issue, and into which they subside.

Thus, first-fruits of accurate knowledge regarding the solar surroundings were gathered, while the value of the brief moments of eclipse gained indefinite increase, by supplementing transient visual impressions with the faithful and lasting records of the camera.

In the year 1868 the history of eclipse spectroscopy virtually began, as that of eclipse photography in 1860; that is to say, the respective methods then first gave definite results. On the 18th of August, 1868, the Indian and Malayan peninsulas were traversed by a lunar shadow producing total obscuration during five minutes and thirty-eight seconds. Two English and two French expeditions were despatched to the distant regions favoured by an event so propitious to the advance of knowledge, chiefly to obtain the verdict of the prism as to the composition of prominences. Nor were they despatched in vain. An identical discovery was made by nearly all the observers. At Jamkandi, in the Western Ghauts, where Lieutenant (now Colonel) Herschel was posted, unremitting bad weather threatened to baffle his eager expectations; but during the lapse of the critical five and a half minutes the clouds broke, and across the driving wrack a "long, finger-like projection" jutted out over the margin of the dark lunar globe. In another moment the spectroscope was pointed towards it; three bright lines--red, orange, and blue--flashed out, and the problem was solved.[514] The problem was solved in this general sense, that the composition out of glowing vapours of the objects infelicitously termed "protuberances" or "prominences" was no longer doubtful; although further inquiry was needed for the determination of the particular species to which those vapours belonged.

Similar, but more complete observations were made, with less atmospheric hindrance, by Tennant and Janssen at Guntoor, by Pogson at Masulipatam, and by Rayet at Wha-Tonne, on the coast of the Malay peninsula, the last observer counting as many as nine bright lines.[515] Among them it was not difficult to recognise the characteristic light of hydrogen; and it was generally, though over-hastily, assumed that the orange ray matched the luminous emissions of sodium. But fuller opportunities were at hand.

The eclipse of 1868 is chiefly memorable for having taught astronomers to do without eclipses, so far, at least, as one particular branch of solar inquiry is concerned. Inspired by the beauty and brilliancy of the variously tinted prominence-lines revealed to him by the spectroscope, Janssen exclaimed to those about him, "Je verrai ces lignes-la en dehors des eclipses!" On the following morning he carried into execution the plan which formed itself in his brain while the phenomenon which suggested it was still before his eyes. It rests upon an easily intelligible principle.

The glare of our own atmosphere alone hides the appendages of the sun from our daily view. To a spectator on an airless planet, the central globe would appear attended by all its splendid retinue of crimson prominences, silvery corona, and far-spreading zodiacal light projected on the star-spangled black background of an absolutely unilluminated sky. Now the spectroscope offers the means of indefinitely weakening atmospheric glare by diffusing a constant amount of it over an area widened ad libitum. But monochromatic or "bright-line" light is, by its nature, incapable of being so diffused. It can, of course, be deviated by refraction to any extent desired; but it always remains equally concentrated, in whatever direction it may be thrown. Hence, when it is mixed up with continuous light--as in the case of the solar flames shining through our atmosphere--it derives a relative gain in intensity from every addition to the dispersive power of the spectroscope with which the heterogeneous mass of beams is analysed. Employ prisms enough, and eventually the undiminished rays of persistent colour will stand out from the continually fading rainbow-tinted band, by which they were at first effectually veiled.

This Janssen saw by a flash of intuition while the eclipse was in progress; and this he realised at 10 A.M. next morning, August 19, 1868--the date of the beginning of spectroscopic work at the margin of the unobscured sun. During the whole of that day and many subsequent ones, he enjoyed, as he said, the advantage of a prolonged eclipse. The intense interest with which he surveyed the region suddenly laid bare to his scrutiny was heightened by evidences of rapid and violent change. On the 18th of August, during the eclipse, a vast spiral structure, at least 89,000 miles high, was perceived, planted in surprising splendour on the rim of the interposed moon. If was formed as General Tennant judged from its appearance in his photographs, by the encounter of two mounting torrents of flame, and was distinguished as the "Great Horn." Next day it was in ruins; hardly a trace remained to show where it had been.[516] Janssen's spectroscope furnished him besides with the strongest confirmation of what had already been reported by the telescope and the camera as to the continuous nature of the scarlet "sierra" lying at the base of the prominences. Everywhere at the sun's edge the same bright lines appeared.

It was not until the 19th of September that Janssen thought fit to send news of his discovery to Europe. It seemed little likely to be anticipated; yet a few minutes before his despatch was handed to the Secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, a communication similar in purport had been received from Sir Norman Lockyer. There is no need to discuss the narrow and wearisome question of priority; each of the competitors deserves, and has obtained, full credit for his invention. With noteworthy and confident prescience, Lockyer, in 1866, before anything was yet known regarding the constitution of the "red flames," ordered a strongly dispersive spectroscope for the express purpose of viewing, apart from eclipses, the bright-line spectrum which he expected them to give. Various delays, however, supervened, and the instrument was not in his hands until October 16, 1868. On the 20th he picked up the vivid rays, of which the presence and (approximately) the positions had in the interim become known. But there is little doubt that, even without that previous knowledge, they would have been found; and that the eclipse of August 18 only accelerated a discovery already assured.

Sir William Huggins, meanwhile, had been tending towards the same goal during two and a half years in his observatory at Tulse Hill. The principle of the spectroscopic visibility of prominence-lines at the edge of an uneclipsed sun was quite explicitly stated by him in February, 1868,[517] and he devised various apparatus for bringing them into actual view; but not until he knew where to look did he succeed in seeing them.

Astronomers, thus liberated, by the acquisition of power to survey them at any time, from the necessity of studying prominences during eclipses, were able to concentrate the whole of their attention on the corona. The first thing to be done was to ascertain the character of its spectrum. This was seen in 1868 only as a faintly continuous one; for Rayet, who seems to have perceived its distinctive bright line far above the summits of the flames, connected it, nevertheless, with those objects. On the other hand, Lieutenant Campbell ascertained on the same occasion the polarisation of the coronal light in planes passing through the sun's centre,[518] thereby showing that light to be, in whole or in part, reflected sunshine. But if reflected sunshine, it was objected, the chief at least of the dark Fraunhofer lines should be visible in it, as they are visible in moonbeams, sky illumination, and all other sun-derived light. The objection was well founded, but was prematurely urged, as we shall see.

On the 7th of August, 1869, a track of total eclipse crossed the continent of North America diagonally, entering at Behring's Straits, and issuing on the coast of North Carolina. It was beset with observers; but the most effective work was done in Iowa. At Des Moines, Professor Harkness of the Naval Observatory, Washington, obtained from the corona an "absolutely continuous spectrum," slightly less bright than that of the full moon, but traversed by a single green ray.[519] The same green ray was seen at Burlington and its position measured by Professor Young of Dartmouth College.[520] It appeared to coincide with that of a dark line of iron in the solar spectrum, numbered 1,474 on Kirchhoff's scale. But in 1876 Young was able, by the use of greatly increased dispersion, to resolve the Fraunhofer line "1474" into a pair, the more refrangible member of which he considered to be the reversal of the green coronal ray.[521] Scarcely called in question for over twenty years, the identification nevertheless broke down through the testimony of the eclipse-photographs of 1898. Sir Norman Lockyer derived from them a position for the line in question notably higher up in the spectrum than that previously assigned to it. Instead of 5,317, its true wave-length proved to be 5,303 ten millionths of a millimetre;[522] nor does it make any show by absorption in dispersed sunlight. The originating substance, designated "coronium," of which nothing is known to terrestrial chemistry, continues luminous[523] at least 300,000 miles above the sun's surface, and is hence presumably much lighter even than hydrogen.

A further trophy was carried off by American skill[524] sixteen months after the determination due to it of the distinctive spectrum of the corona. The eclipse of December 22, 1870, though lasting only two minutes and ten seconds, drew observers from the New, as well as from the Old World to the shores of the Mediterranean. Janssen issued from beleaguered Paris in a balloon, carrying with him the vital parts of a reflector specially constructed to collect evidence about the corona. But he reached Oran only to find himself shut behind a cloud-curtain more impervious than the Prussian lines. Everywhere the sky was more or less overcast. Lockyer's journey from England to Sicily, and shipwreck in the Psyche, were recompensed with a glimpse of the solar aureola during one second and a half! Three parties stationed at various heights on Mount Etna saw absolutely nothing. Nevertheless important information was snatched in despite of the elements.

The prominent event was Young's discovery of the "reversing layer." As the surviving solar crescent narrowed before the encroaching moon, "the dark lines of the spectrum," he tells us, "and the spectrum itself, gradually faded away, until all at once, as suddenly as a bursting rocket shoots out its stars, the whole field of view was filled with bright lines more numerous than one could count. The phenomenon was so sudden, so unexpected, and so wonderfully beautiful, as to force an involuntary exclamation."[525] Its duration was about two seconds, and the impression produced was that of a complete reversal of the Fraunhofer spectrum--that is, the substitution of a bright for every dark line.

Now something of the kind was theoretically necessary to account for the dusky rays in sunlight which have taught us so much, and have yet much more to teach us; so that, although surprising from its transitory splendour, the appearance could not strictly be called "unexpected." Moreover, its premonitory symptom in the fading out of these rays had been actually described by Secchi in 1868,[526] and looked for by Young as the moon covered the sun in August 1869. But with the slit of his spectroscope placed normally to the sun's limb, the bright lines gave a flash too thin to catch the eye. In 1870 the position of the slit was tangential--it ran along the shallow bed of incandescent vapours, instead of cutting across it: hence his success.

The same observation was made at Xerez de la Frontera by Mr. Pye, a member of Young's party; and, although an exceedingly delicate one, has since frequently been repeated. The whole Fraunhofer series appeared bright (omitting other instances) to Maclear, Herschel, and Fyers in 1871, at the beginning or end of totality; to Pogson, at the break-up of an annual eclipse, June 6, 1872; to Stone at Klipfontein, April 16, 1874, when he saw "the field full of bright lines."[527] But between the picture presented by the "veritable pluie de lignes brilliantes,"[528] which descended into M. Trepied's spectroscope for three seconds after the disappearance of the sun, May 17, 1882, and the familiar one of the dark-line solar spectrum, certain differences were perceiving, showing their relation to be not simply that of a positive to a negative impression.

A "reversing layer," or stratum of mixed vapours, glowing, but at a lower temperature than that of the actual solar surface, was an integral part of Kirchhoff's theory of the production of the Fraunhofer lines. Here it was assumed that the missing rays were stopped, and here also it was assumed that the missing rays would be seen bright, could they be isolated from the overpowering splendour of their background. This isolation is effected by eclipses, with the result--beautifully confirmatory of theory--of reversing, or turning from dark to bright, the Fraunhofer spectrum. The completeness and precision of the reversal, however, could not be visually attested; and a quarter of a century elapsed before a successful "snap-shot" provided photographic evidence on the subject. It was taken at Novaya Zemlya by Mr. Shackleton, a member of the late Sir George Baden-Powell's expedition to observe the eclipse of August 9, 1896;[529] and similar records in abundance were secured during the Indian eclipse of January 22, 1898,[530] and the Spanish-American eclipse of May 28, 1900.[531] The result of their leisurely examination has been to verify the existence of a "reversing-layer," in the literal sense of the term. It is true that no single "flash" photograph is an inverted transcript of the Fraunhofer spectrum. The lines are, indeed, in each case--speaking broadly--the same; but their relative intensities are widely different. Yet this need occasion no surprise when we remember that the Fraunhofer spectrum integrates the absorption of multitudinous strata, various in density and composition, while only the upper section of the formation comes within view of the sensitive plates exposed at totalities, the low-lying vaporous beds being necessarily covered by the moon. The total depth of this glowing envelope may be estimated at 500 to 600 miles, and its normal state seems to be one of profound tranquillity, judging from the imperturbable aspect of the array of dark lines due to its sifting action upon light.

The last of the five eclipses which we have grouped together for separate consideration was visible in Southern India and Australia, December 12, 1871. Some splendid photographs were secured by the English parties on the Malabar coast, showing, for the first time, the remarkable branching forms of the coronal emanations; but the most conspicuous result was Janssen's detection of some of the dark Fraunhofer lines, long vainly sought in the continuous spectrum of the corona. Chief among these was the D-line of sodium, the original index, it might be said, to solar chemistry. No proof could be afforded more decisive that this faint echoing back of the distinctive notes of the Fraunhofer spectrum, that the polariscope had spoken the truth in asserting a large part of the coronal radiance to be reflected sunlight. But it is usually so drenched in original luminosity, that its special features are almost obliterated. Janssen's success in seizing them was due in part to the extreme purity of the air at Sholoor, in the Neilgherries, where he was stationed; in part to the use of an instrument adapted by its large aperture and short focus to give an image of the utmost brilliancy. His observation, repeated during the Caroline Island eclipse of 1883, was photographically verified ten years later by M. de la Baume Pluvinel in Senegal.[532]

An instrument of great value for particular purposes was introduced into eclipse-work in 1871. The "slitless spectroscope" consists simply of a prism placed outside the object-glass of a telescope or the lens of a camera, whereby the radiance encompassing the eclipsed sun is separated into as many differently tinted rings as it contains different kinds of light. These tinted rings were simultaneously viewed by Respighi at Poodacottah, and by Lockyer at Baikul. Their photographic registration by the latter in 1875 initiated the transformation of the slitless spectroscope into the prismatic camera.[533] Meanwhile, the use of an ordinary spectroscope by Herschel and Tennant at Dodabetta showed the green ray of coronium to be just as bright in a rift as in the adjacent streamer. The visible structure of the corona was thus seen to be independent of the distribution of the gases which enter into its composition.

By means, then, of the five great eclipses of 1860-71 it was ascertained: first, that the prominences, and at least the lower part of the corona, are genuine solar appurtenances; secondly, that the prominences are composed of hydrogen and other gases in a state of incandescence, and rise, as irregular outliers, from a continuous envelope of the same materials, some thousands of miles in thickness; thirdly, that the corona is of a highly complex constitution, being made up in part of glowing vapours, in part of matter capable of reflecting sunlight. We may now proceed to consider the results of subsequent eclipses.

These have raised, and have helped to solve, some very curious questions. Indeed, every carefully watched total eclipse of the sun stimulates as well as appeases curiosity, and leaves a legacy of outstanding doubt, continually, as time and inquiry go on, removed, but continually replaced. It cannot be denied that the corona is a perplexing phenomenon, and that it does not become less perplexing as we know more about it. It presented itself under quite a new and strange aspect on the occasion of the eclipse which visited the Western States of North America, July 29, 1878. The conditions of observation were peculiarly favourable. The weather was superb; above the Rocky Mountains the sky was of such purity as to permit the detection of Jupiter's satellites with the naked eye on several successive nights. The opportunity for advancing knowledge was made the most of. Nearly a hundred astronomers, including several Englishmen, occupied twelve separate posts, and prepared for an attack in force.

The question had often suggested itself, and was a natural one to ask, whether the corona sympathises with the general condition of the sun? whether, either in shape or brilliancy, it varies with the progress of the sun-spot period? A more propitious moment for getting this question answered could hardly have been chosen than that at which the eclipse occurred. Solar disturbance was just then at its lowest ebb. The development of spots for the month of July, 1878, was represented on Wolf's system of "relative numbers" by the fraction 0.1, as against 135.4 for December, 1870, an epoch of maximum activity. The "chromosphere"[534] was, for the most part, shallow and quiescent; its depth, above the spot zones, had sunk from about 6,000 to 2,000 miles;[535] prominences were few and faint. Obviously, if a type of corona corresponding to a minimum of sun-spots existed, it should be seen then or never. It was seen; but while, in some respects, it agreed with anticipation, in others it completely set it at naught.

The corona of 1878, as compared with those of 1869, 1870, and 1871, was generally admitted to be shrunken in its main outlines and much reduced in brilliancy. Lockyer pronounced it ten times fainter than in 1871; Harkness estimated its light at less than one-seventh that derived from the mist-blotted aureola of 1870.[536] In shape, too, it was markedly different. When sun-spots are numerous, the corona appears to be most fully developed above the spot-zones, thus offering to our eyes a rudely quadrilateral contour. The four great luminous sheaves forming the corners of the square are made up of rays curving together from each side into "synclinal" or ogival groups, each of which may be compared to the petal of a flower. To Janssen, in 1871, the eclipsing moon seemed like the dark heart of a gigantic dahlia, painted in light on the sky; and the similitude to the ornament on a compass-card, used by Airy in 1851, well conveys the decorative effect of the beamy, radiated kind of aureola, never, it would appear, absent when solar activity is at a tolerably high pitch. In his splendid volume on eclipses,[537] with which the systematic study of coronal structure may be said to have begun, Mr. Ranyard first generalised the synclinal peculiarity by a comparison of records; but the symmetry of the arrangement, though frequently striking, is liable to be confused by secondary formations. He further pointed out, with the help of careful drawings from the photographs of 1871 made by Mr. Wesley, the curved and branching shapes assumed by the component filaments of massive bundles of rays. Nothing of all this, however, was visible in 1878. Instead, there was seen, as the groundwork of the corona, a ring of pearly light, nebulous to the eye, but shown by telescopes and in photographs to have a fibrous texture, as if made up of tufts of fine hairs. North and south, a series of short, vivid, electrical-looking flame-brushes diverged with conspicuous regularity from each of the solar poles. Their direction was not towards the centre of the sun, but towards each summit of his axis, so that the farther rays on either side started almost tangentially to the surface.

But the leading, and a truly amazing, characteristic of the phenomenon was formed by two vast, faintly-luminous wings of light, expanded on either side of the sun in the direction of the ecliptic. These were missed by very few careful onlookers; but the extent assigned to them varied with skill in, and facilities for seeing. By far the most striking observations were made by Newcomb at Separation (Wyoming), by Cleveland Abbe from the shoulder of Pike's Peak, and by Langley at its summit, an elevation of 14,100 feet above the sea. Never before had an eclipse been viewed from anything approaching that altitude, or under so translucent a sky. A proof of the great reduction in atmospheric glare was afforded by the perceptibility of the corona four minutes after totality was over. For the 165 seconds of its duration, the remarkable streamers above alluded to continued "persistently visible," stretching away right and left of the sun to a distance of at least ten million miles! One branch was traced over an apparent extent of fully twelve lunar diameters, without sign of a definite termination having been reached; and there were no grounds for supposing the other more restricted.

The resemblance to the zodiacal light was striking; and a community of origin between that enigmatical member of our system and the corona was irresistibly suggested. We should, indeed, expect to see, under such exceptionally favourable atmospheric conditions as Professor Langley enjoyed on Pike's Peak, the roots of the zodiacal light presenting near the sun just such an appearance as he witnessed; but we can imagine no reason why their visibility should be associated with a low state of solar activity. Nevertheless this seems to be the case with the streamers which astonished astronomers in 1878. For in August, 1867, when similar equatorial emanations, accompanied by similar symptoms of polar excitement, were described and depicted by Grosch[538] of the Santiago Observatory, sun-spots were at a minimum; while the corona of 1715, which appears from the record of it by Roger Cotes[539] to have been of the same type, preceded by three years the ensuing maximum. The eclipsed sun was seen by him at Cambridge, May 2, 1715, encompassed with a ring of light about one-sixth of the moon's diameter in breadth, upon which was superposed a luminous cross formed of long bright branches lying very nearly in the plane of the ecliptic, and shorter polar arms so faint as to be only intermittently visible. The resemblance between his sketch and Cleveland Abbe's drawing of the corona of 1878 is extremely striking. It should, nevertheless, be noted that some conspicuous spots were visible on the sun's disc at the time of Cotes's eclipse, and that the preceding minimum (according to Wolf) occurred in 1712. Thus, the coincidence of epochs is imperfect.

Professor Cleveland Abbe was fully persuaded that the long rays carefully observed by him from Pike's Peak were nothing else than streams of meteorites rushing towards or from perihelion; and it is quite certain that the solar neighbourhood must be crowded with such bodies. But the peculiar structure at the base of the streamers displayed in the photographs, the curved rays meeting in pointed arches like Gothic windows, the visible upspringing tendency, the filamentous texture,[540] speak unmistakably of the action of forces proceeding from the sun, not of extraneous matter circling round him.

A further proof of sympathetic change in the corona is afforded by the analysis of its light. In 1878 the bright line so conspicuous in the coronal spectrum in 1870 and 1871 had faded to the very limit of visibility. Several skilled observers failed to see it at all; but Young and Eastman succeeded in tracing the green "coronium" ray all round the sun, to a height estimated at 340,000 miles. The substance emitting it was thus present, though in a low state of incandescence. The continuous spectrum was relatively strong; faint traces of the Fraunhofer lines attested for it an origin, in part by reflection; and polarisation was undoubted, increasing towards the limb, whereas in 1870 it reached a maximum at a considerable distance from it. Experiments with Edison's tasimeter seemed to show that the corona radiates a sensible amount of heat.

The next promising eclipse occurred May 17, 1882. The concourse of astronomers which has become usual on such occasions assembled this time at Sohag, in Upper Egypt. Rarely have seventy-four seconds been turned to such account. To each observer a special task was assigned, and the advantages of a strict division of labour were visible in the variety and amount of the information gained.

The year 1882 was one of numerous sun-spots. On the eve of the eclipse twenty-three separate maculae were counted. If there were any truth in the theory which connected coronal forms with fluctuations in solar activity, it might be anticipated that the vast equatorial expansions and polar "brushes" of 1878 would be found replaced by the star-like structure of 1871. This expectation was literally fulfilled. No lateral streamers were to be seen. The universal failure to perceive them, after express search in a sky of the most transparent purity, justifies the emphatic assertion that they were not there. Instead, the type of corona observed in India eleven years earlier, was reproduced with its shining aigrettes, complex texture and brilliant radiated aspect.

Concordant testimony was given by the spectroscope. The reflected light derived from the corona was weaker than in 1878, while its original emissions were proportionately intensified. Nevertheless, most of the bright lines recorded as coronal[541] were really due, there can be no doubt, to diffused chromospheric light. On this occasion, the first successful attempt was made to photograph the coronal spectrum procured in the ordinary way with a slit and prisms, while the prismatic camera was also profitably employed. It served to bring out at least one important fact--that of the uncommon strength in chromospheric regions of the twin violet beams of calcium, designated "H" and "K"; and prominence-photography signalised its improvement by the registration, in the spectrum of one such object, of twenty-nine rays, including many of the ultra-violet hydrogen series discovered by Sir William Huggins in the emission of white stars.[542]

Dr. Schuster's photographs of the corona itself were the most extensive, as well as the most detailed, of any yet secured. One rift imprinted itself on the plates to a distance of nearly a diameter and a half from the limb; and the transparency of the streamers was shown by the delineation through them of the delicate tracery beyond. The singular and picturesque feature was added of a bright comet, self-depicted in all the exquisite grace of swift movement betrayed by the fine curve of its tail, hurrying away from one of its rare visits to our sun, and rendered momentarily visible by the withdrawal of the splendour in which it had been, and was again quickly veiled.

From a careful study of these valuable records Sir William Huggins derived the idea of a possible mode of photographing the corona without an eclipse.[543] As already stated, its ordinary invisibility is entirely due to the "glare" or reflected light diffused through our atmosphere. But Huggins found, on examining Schuster's negatives, that a large proportion of the light in the coronal spectrum, both continuous and interrupted, is collected in the violet region between the Fraunhofer lines G and H. There, then, he hoped that, all other rays being excluded, it might prove strong enough to vanquish inimical glare, and stamp on prepared plates, through local superiority in illuminative power, the forms of the appendage by which it is emitted.

His experiments were begun towards the end of May, 1882, and by September 28 he had obtained a fair earnest of success. The exclusion of all other qualities of light save that with which he desired to operate, was accomplished by using chloride of silver as his sensitive material, that substance being chemically inert to all other but those precise rays in which the corona has the advantage.[544] Plates thus sensitised received impressions which it was hardly possible to regard as spurious. "Not only the general features," Captain Abney affirmed,[545] "are the same, but details, such as rifts and streamers, have the same position and form." It was found, moreover, that the corona photographed during the total eclipse of May 6, 1883, was intermediate in shape between the coronas photographed by Sir William Huggins before and after that event, each picture taking its proper place in a series of progressive modifications highly interesting in themselves, and full of promise for the value of the method employed to record them.[546] But experiments on the subject were singularly interrupted. The volcanic explosion in the Straits of Sunda in August, 1883, brought to astronomers a peculiarly unwelcome addition to their difficulties. The magnificent sunglows due to the diffractive effects on light of the vapours and fine dust flung in vast volumes into the air, and rapidly diffused all round the globe, betokened an atmospheric condition of all others the most prejudicial to delicate researches in the solar vicinity. The filmy coronal forms, accordingly, which had been hopefully traced on the Tulse Hill plates ceased to appear there; nor were any substantially better results obtained by Mr. C. Ray Woods, in the purer air either of the Riffel or the Cape of Good Hope, during the three ensuing years. Moreover, attempts to obtain coronal photographs during the partial phases of the eclipse of August 29, 1886, completely failed. No part of the lunar globe became visible in relief against circumfluous solar radiance on any of the plates exposed at Grenada; and what vestiges of "structure" there were, came out almost better upon the moon than beside her, thus stamping themselves at once as of atmospheric origin.

That the effect sought is a perfectly possible one is proved by the distinct appearance of the moon projected on the corona, in photographs of the partially eclipsed sun in 1858, 1889, and 1890, and very notably in 1898 and 1900.[547]

In the spring of 1893, Professor Hale[548] attacked the problem of coronal daylight photography, employing the "double-slit" method so eminently serviceable for the delineation of prominences.[549] But neither at Kenwood nor at the summit of Pike's Peak, whither, in the course of the summer, he removed his apparatus, was any action of the desired kind secured. Similar ill success attended his and Professor Ricco's employment, on Mount Etna in July, 1894, of a specially designed coronagraph. Yet discouragement did not induce despair. The end in view is indeed too important to be readily abandoned; but it can be reached only when a more particular acquaintance with the nature of coronal light than we now possess indicates the appropriate device for giving it a preferential advantage in self-portraiture. Moreover, the effectiveness of this device may not improbably be enhanced, through changes in the coronal spectrum at epochs of sun-spot maximum.

The prosperous result of the Sohag observations stimulated the desire to repeat them on the first favourable opportunity. This offered itself one year later, May 6, 1883, yet not without the drawbacks incident to terrestrial conditions. The eclipse promised was of rare length, giving no less than five minutes and twenty-three seconds of total obscurity, but its path was almost exclusively a "water-track." It touched land only on the outskirts of the Marquesas group in the Southern Pacific, and presented, as the one available foothold for observers, a coral reef named Caroline Island, seven and a half miles long by one and a half wide, unknown previously to 1874, and visited only for the sake of its stores of guano. Seldom has a more striking proof been given of the vividness of human curiosity as to the condition of the worlds outside our own, than in the assemblage of a group of distinguished men from the chief centres of civilisation, on a barren ridge, isolated in a vast and tempestuous ocean, at a distance, in many cases, of 11,000 miles and upwards from the ordinary scene of their labours. And all these sacrifices--the cost and care of preparation, the transport and readjustment of delicate instruments, the contrivance of new and more subtle means of investigating phenomena--on the precarious chance of a clear sky during one particular five minutes! The event, though fortunate, emphasised the hazard of the venture. The observation of the eclipse was made possible only by the happy accident of a serene interval between two storms.

The American expedition was led by Professor Edward S. Holden, and to it were courteously permitted to be attached Messrs. Lawrance and Woods, photographers, sent out by the Royal Society of London. M. Janssen was chief of the French Academy mission; he was accompanied from Meudon by Trouvelot, and joined from Vienna by Palisa, and from Rome by Tacchini. A large share of the work done was directed to assuring or negativing previous results. The circumstances of an eclipse favour illusion. A single observation by a single observer, made under unfamiliar conditions, and at a moment of peculiar excitement, can scarcely be regarded as offering more than a suggestion for future inquiry. But incredulity may be carried too far. Janssen, for instance, felt compelled, by the survival of unwise doubts, to devote some of the precious minutes of obscurity at Caroline Island to confirming what, in his own persuasion, needed no confirmation--that is, the presence of reflected Fraunhofer lines in the spectrum of the corona. Trouvelot and Palisa, on the other hand, instituted an exhaustive, but fruitless search for the spurious "intramercurian" planets announced by Swift and Watson in 1878.

New information, however, was not deficient. The corona proved identical in type with that of 1882,[550] agreeably to what was expected at an epoch of protracted solar activity. The characteristic aigrettes were of even greater brilliancy than in the preceding year, and the chemical effects of the coronal light proved unusually intense. Janssen's photographs, owing to the considerable apertures (six and eight inches) of his object-glasses, and the long exposures permitted by the duration of totality, were singularly perfect; they gave a greater extension to the coronal than could be traced with the telescope,[551] and showed its forms as absolutely fixed and of remarkable complexity.

The English pictures, taken with exposures up to sixty seconds, were likewise of great value. They exhibited details of structure from the limb to the tips of the streamers, which terminated definitely, and as it seemed actually, where the impressions on the plates ceased. The coronal spectrum was also successfully photographed, and although the reversing layer in its entirety evaded record, a print was caught of some of its more prominent rays just before and after totality. The use of the prismatic camera was baffled by the anomalous scarcity of prominences.

Using an ingenious apparatus for viewing simultaneously the spectrum from both sides of the sun, Professor Hastings noticed at Caroline Island alternations, with the advance of the moon, in the respective heights above the right and left solar limbs of the coronal green line, which were thought to imply that the corona, with its rifts and sheaves and "tangled hanks" of rays, is, after all, merely an illusive appearance produced by the diffraction of sunlight at the moon's edge.[552] But the observation was assuredly misleading or misinterpreted. Atmospheric diffusion may indeed, under favouring circumstances, be effective in deceptively enlarging solar appendages; but always to a very limited extent.

The controversy is an old one as to the part played by our air in producing the radiance visible round the eclipsed sun. In its original form, it is true, it came to an end when Professor Harkness, in 1869,[553] pointed out that the shadow of the moon falls equally over the air and on the earth, and that if the sun had no luminous appendages, a circular space of almost absolute darkness would consequently surround the apparent places of the superposed sun and moon. Mr. Proctor,[554] with his usual ability, impressed this mathematically certain truth upon public attention; and Sir John Herschel calculated that the diameter of the "negative halo" thus produced would be, in general, no less than 23 deg.

But about the same time a noteworthy circumstance relating to the state of things in the solar vicinity was brought into view. On February 11, 1869, Messrs. Frankland and Lockyer communicated to the Royal Society a series of experiments on gaseous spectra under varying conditions of heat and density, leading them to the conclusion that the higher solar prominences exist in a medium of excessive tenuity, and that even at the base of the chromosphere the pressure is far below that at the earth's surface.[555] This inference was fully borne out by the researches of Wuellner; and Janssen expressed the opinion that the chromospheric gases are rarefied almost to the degree of an air-pump vacuum.[556] Hence was derived a general and fully justified conviction that there could be outside, and incumbent upon the chromosphere, no such vast atmosphere as the corona appeared to represent. Upon the strength of which conviction the "glare" theory entered, chiefly under the auspices of Sir Norman Lockyer, upon the second stage of its existence.

The genuineness of the "inner corona" to the height of 5' or 6' from the limb was admitted; but it was supposed that by the detailed reflection of its light in our air the far more extensive "outer corona" was optically created, the irregularities of the moon's edge being called in to account for the rays and rifts by which its structure was varied. This view received some countenance from Admiral Maclear's observation, during the eclipse of 1870, of bright lines "everywhere"--even at the centre of the lunar disc. Here, indeed, was an undoubted case of atmospheric diffusion; but here, also, was a safe index to the extent of its occurrence. Light scatters equally in all directions; so that when the moon's face at the time of an eclipse shows (as is the common case) a blank in the spectroscope, it is quite certain that the corona is not noticeably enlarged by atmospheric causes. A sky drifted over with thin cirrus clouds and air changed with aqueous vapour amply accounted for the abnormal amount of scattering in 1870.

But even in 1870 positive evidence was obtained of the substantial reality of the radiated outer corona, in the appearance on the photographic plates exposed by Willard in Spain and by Brothers in Sicily of identical dark rifts. The truth is, that far from being developed by misty air, it is peculiarly liable to be effaced by it. The purer the sky, the more extensive, brilliant, and intricate in the details of its structure the corona appears. Take as an example General Myer's description of the eclipse of 1869, as seen from the summit of White Top Mountain, Virginia, at an elevation above the sea of 5,523 feet, in an atmosphere of peculiar clearness.

"To the unaided eye," he wrote,[557] "the eclipse presented, during the total obscuration, a vision magnificent beyond description. As a centre stood the full and intensely black disc of the moon, surrounded by the aureola of a soft bright light, through which shot out, as if from the circumference of the moon, straight, massive, silvery rays, seeming distinct and separate from each other, to a distance of two or three diameters of the solar disc; the whole spectacle showing as on a background of diffused rose-coloured light."

On the same day, at Des Moines, Newcomb could perceive, through somewhat hazy air, no long rays, and the four-pointed outline of the corona reached at its farthest only a single semidiameter of the moon from the limb. The plain fact, that our atmosphere acts rather as a veil to hide the coronal radiance than as the medium through which it is visually formed, emerges from further innumerable records.

No observations of importance were made during the eclipse of September 9, 1885. The path of total obscurity touched land only on the shores of New Zealand, and two minutes was the outside limit of available time. Hence local observers had the phenomenon to themselves; nor were they even favoured by the weather in their efforts to make the most of it. One striking appearance was, however, disclosed. It was that of two "white" prominences of unusual brilliancy, shining like a pair of electric lamps hung one at each end of a solar diameter, right above the places of two large spots.[558] This coincidence of diametrically opposite disturbances is of too frequent occurrence to be accidental. M. Trouvelot observed at Meudon, June 26, 1885, two active and evanescent prominences thus situated, each rising to the enormous height of 300,000 miles; and on August 16, one scarcely less remarkable, balanced by an antipodal spot-group.[559] It towered upward, as if by a process of unrolling, to a quarter of a million of miles; after which, in two minutes, the light died out of it; it had become completely extinct. The development, again from the ends of a diameter, of a pair of similar objects was watched, September 19 and 20, 1893, by Father Fenyi, Director of the Kalocsa Observatory; and the phenomenon has been too often repeated to be accidental.

The eclipse of August 29, 1886, was total during about four minutes over tropical Atlantic regions; and an English expedition, led by Sir Norman Lockyer, was accordingly despatched to Grenada in the West Indies, for the purpose of using the opportunity it offered. But the rainy season was just then at its height: clouds and squalls were the order of the day; and the elaborately planned programme of observation could only in part be carried through. Some good work, none the less, was done. Professor Tacchini, who had been invited to accompany the party, ascertained besides some significant facts about prominences. From a comparison of their forms and sizes during and after the eclipse, it appeared that only the growing vaporous cores of these objects are shown by the spectroscope under ordinary circumstances; their upper sections, giving a faint continuous spectrum, and composed of presumably cooler materials, can only be seen when the veil of scattered light usually drawn over them is removed by an eclipse. Thus all modestly tall prominences have silvery summits; but all do not appear to possess the "red heart of flame," by which alone they can be rendered perceptible to daylight observation. Some prove to be ordinarily invisible, because silvery throughout--"sheeted ghosts," as it were, met only in the dark.

Specimens of the class had been noted as far back as 1842, but Tacchini first drew particular attention to them. The one observed by him in 1886 rose in a branching form to a height of 150,000 miles, and gave a brilliantly continuous spectrum, with bright lines at H and K, but no hydrogen-lines.[560] Hence the total invisibility of the object before and after the eclipse. During the eclipse, it was seen framed, as it were, in a pointed arch of coronal light, the symmetrical arrangement of which with regard to it was obviously significant. Both its unspringing shape, and the violet rays of calcium strongly emitted by it, contradicted the supposition that "white prominences" represent a downrush of refrigerated materials.

The corona of 1886, as photographed by Dr. Schuster and Mr. Maunder, showed neither the petals and plumes of 1871, nor the streamers of 1878. It might be called of a transition type.[561] Wide polar rifts were filled in with tufted radiations, and bounded on either side by irregularly disposed, compound luminous masses. In the south-western quadrant, a triangular ray, conspicuous to the naked eye, represented, Mr. W. H. Pickering thought, the projection of a huge, hollow cone.[562] Branched and recurving jets were curiously associated with it. The intrinsic photographic brightness of the corona proved, from Pickering's measures, to be about 1/54 that of the average surface of the full moon.

The Russian eclipse of August 19, 1887, can only be remembered as a disastrous failure. Much was expected of it. The shadow-path ran overland from Leipsic to the Japanese sea, so that the solar appurtenances would, it was hoped, be disclosed to observers echeloned along a line of 6,000 miles. But the incalculable element of weather rendered all forecasts nugatory. The clouds never parted, during the critical three minutes, over Central Russia, where many parties were stationed, and Professor D. P. Todd was equally unfortunate in Japan. Some good photographs were, nevertheless, secured by Professor Arai, Director of the Tokio Observatory, as well as by MM. Belopolsky and Glasenapp at Petrovsk and Jurjevitch respectively. They showed a corona of simpler form than that of the year before, but not yet of the pronounced type first associated by Mr. Ranyard with the lowest stage of solar activity.

The genuineness of the association was ratified by the duplicate spectacle of the next-ensuing minimum year. Two total eclipses of the sun distinguished 1889. The first took place on New Year's Day, when a narrow shadow-path crossed California, allowing less than two minutes for the numerous experiments prompted by the varied nature of modern methods of research. American astronomers availed themselves of the occasion to the full. The heavens were propitious. Photographic records were obtained in unprecedented abundance, and of unusual excellence. Their comparison and study placed it beyond reasonable doubt that the radiated corona belonging to periods of maximum sun-spots gives place, at periods of minimum, to the "winged" type of 1878. Professor Holden perceived further that the equatorial extensions characterising the latter tend to assume a "trumpet-shape."[563] Their extremities diverge, as if mutually repellent, instead of flowing together along a medial plane. The maximum actinic brilliancy of the corona of January 1, 1889, was determined at Lick to be twenty-one times less than that of the full moon.[564] Its colour was described as "of an intense luminous silver, with a bluish tinge, similar to the light of an electric arc."[565] Its spectrum was comparatively simple. Very few bright lines besides those of hydrogen and coronium, and apparently no dark ones, stood out from the prismatic background.

"The marked structural features of the corona, as presented by the negatives" taken by Professors Nipher and Charroppin, were the filaments and the streamers. The filaments issued from polar calottes of 20 deg. radius.

"The impression conveyed to the eye," Professor Pritchett wrote,[566] "is that the equatorial stream of denser coronal matter extends across and through the filaments, simply obscuring them by its greater brightness. The effect is just as if the equatorial belt were superposed upon, or passed through, the filamentary structure. There is nothing in the photographs to prove that the filaments do not exist all round the sun.[567] The testimony from negatives of different lengths of exposure goes to show that the equatorial streamers are made up of numerous interlacing parts inclined at varying angles to the sun's equator."

The coronal extensions, perceptible with the naked eye to a distance of more than 3 deg. from the sun, appeared barely one-third of that length on the best negatives. Little more could be seen of them either in Barnard's exquisite miniature pictures, or in the photographs obtained by W. H. Pickering with a thirteen-inch refractor--the largest instrument so far used in eclipse-photography.

The total eclipse of December 22, 1889, held out a prospect, unfortunately not realized, of removing some of the doubts and difficulties that impeded the progress of coronal photography.[568] Messrs. Burnham and Schaeberle secured at Cayenne some excellent impressions, showing enough of the corona to prove its identical character with that depicted in the beginning of the year, but not enough to convey additional information about its terminal forms or innermost structure. Any better result was indeed impossible, the moisture-laden air having cut down the actinic power of the coronal light to one-fourth its previous value.

Two English expeditions organized by the Royal Astronomical Society fared still worse. Mr. Taylor was stationed on the West Coast of Africa, one hundred miles south of Loanda; Father Perry chose as the scene of his operations the Salut Islands, off French Guiana. Each was supplied with a reflector constructed by Dr. Common, endowed, by its extremely short focal length of forty-five, combined with an aperture of twenty inches, with a light-concentrating force capable, it was hoped, of compelling the very filmiest coronal branches to self-registration. Had things gone well two sets of coronal pictures, absolutely comparable in every respect, and taken at an interval of two hours and a half, would have been at the disposal of astronomers. But things went very far from well. Clouds altogether obscured the sun in Africa; they only separated to allow of his shining through a saturated atmosphere in South America. Father Perry's observations were the last heroic effort of a dying man. Stricken with malaria, he crawled to the hospital as soon as the eclipse was over, and expired five days later, at sea, on board the Comus. He was buried at Barbados. And the sacrifice of his life had, after all, purchased no decisive success. Most of the plates exposed by him suffered deterioration from the climate, or from an inevitably delayed development. A drawing from the best of them by Miss Violet Common[569] represented a corona differing from its predecessor of January 1, chiefly through the oppositely unsymmetrical relations of its parts. Then the western wing had been broader at its base than the eastern; now the inequality was conspicuously the other way.[570]

The next opportunity for retrieving the mischances of the past was offered April 16, 1893. The line of totality charted for that day ran from Chili to Senegambia. American parties appropriated the Andes; both shores of the Atlantic were in English occupation; French expeditions, led by Deslandres and Bigourdan, took up posts south of Cape Verde. A long totality of more than four minutes was favoured by serene skies; hence an ample store of photographic data was obtained. Professor Schaeberle, of the Lick Observatory, took, almost without assistance, at Mina Bronces, a mining station 6,600 feet above the Pacific, fifty-two negatives, eight of them with a forty-foot telescope, on a scale of four and a half inches to the solar diameter. Not only the inner corona, but the array of prominences then conspicuous, appeared in them to be composed of fibrous jets and arches, held to be sections of elliptic orbits described by luminous particles about the sun's centre.[571] One plate received the impression of a curious object,[572] entangled amidst coronal streamers, and the belief in its cometary nature was ratified by the bestowal of a comet-medal in recognition of the discovery. Similiar paraboloidal forms had, nevertheless, occasionally been seen to make an integral part of earlier coronas; and it remains extremely doubtful whether Schaeberle's "eclipse-comet" was justly entitled to the character claimed for it.

The eclipse of 1893 disclosed a radiated corona such as a year of spot-maximum was sure to bring. An unexpected fact about it was, however, ascertained. The coronal has been believed to have much in common with the chromospheric spectrum; it proved, on investigation with a large prismatic camera, employed under Sir Norman Lockyer's directions by Mr. Fowler at Fundium, to be absolutely distinct from it. The fundamental green ray had, on the West African plates, seven more refrangible associates;[573] but all alike are of unknown origin. They may be due to many substances, or to one; future research will perhaps decide; we can at present only say that the gaseous emission of the corona include none from hydrogen, helium, calcium, or any other recognisable terrestrial element. Deslandres' attempt to determine the rotation of the corona through opposite displacements, east and west of the interposed moon, of the violet calcium-lines supposed to make part of the coronal spectrum, was thus rendered nugatory. Yet it gave an earnest of success, by definitely introducing the subject into the constantly lengthened programme of eclipse-work. There is, however, little prospect of its being treated effectively until the green line is vivified by a fresh access of solar activity.

The flight of the moon's shadow was, on August 9, 1896, dogged by atrocious weather. It traversed, besides, some of the most inhospitable regions on the earth's surface, and afforded, at the best, but a brief interval of obscurity. At Novaya Zemlya, however, of all places, the conditions were tolerably favourable, and, as we have seen, the trophy of a "flash-spectrograph" was carried off. Some coronal photographs, moreover, taken by the late Sir George Baden-Powell[574] and by M. Hansky, a member of a Russian party, were marked by features of considerable interest. They made apparent a close connection between coronal outflows and chromospheric jets, cone-shaped beams serving as the sheaths, or envelopes, of prominences. M. Hansky,[575] indeed, thought that every streamer had a chromospheric eruption at its base. Further, dark veinings of singular shapes unmistakably interrupted the coronal light, and bordered brilliant prominences,[576] reminding us of certain "black lines" traced by Swift across the "anvil protuberance" August 7, 1869.[577] In type the corona of 1896 reproduced that of 1886, as befitted its intermediate position in the solar cycle.

The eclipse-track on January 22, 1898, crossed the Indian peninsula from Viziadrug, on the Malabar coast, to Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Not a cloud obstructed the view anywhere, and an unprecedented harvest of photographic records was garnered. The flash-spectrum, in its successive phases, appeared on plates taken by Sir Norman Lockyer, Mr. Evershed, Professor Campbell,[578] and others; Professor Turner[579] set on foot a novel mode of research by picturing the corona in the polarised ingredient of its light; Mrs. Maunder[580] practically solved the problem of photographing the faint coronal extensions, one ray on her plates running out to nearly six diameters from the moon's limb. Yet she used a Dallmeyer lens of only one and a half inches aperture. Her success accorded perfectly with Professor Wadsworth's conclusion that effectiveness in delineation by slight contrasts of luminosity varies inversely with aperture. Triple-coated plates, and a comparatively long exposure of twenty seconds, contributed to a result unlikely, for some time, to be surpassed. The corona of 1898 presented a mixed aspect. The polar plumes due at minimum were combined in it with the quadrilateral ogives belonging to spot-maxima. A slow course of transformation, in fact, seemed in progress; and it was found to be completed in 1900, when the eclipse of May 28 revealed the typical halo of a quiescent sun.

The obscurity on this occasion was short--less than 100 seconds--but was well observed east and west of the Atlantic. No striking gain in knowledge, however, resulted. Important experiments were indeed made on the heat of the corona with Langley's bolometer, but their upshot can scarcely be admitted as decisive. They indicated a marked deficiency of thermal radiations, implying for coronal light, in Professor Langley's opinion,[581] an origin analogous to that of the electric glow-discharge, which, at low pressures, was found by K. Angstrom in 1893 to have no invisible heat-spectrum.[582] The corona was photographed by Professor Barnard, at Wadesborough, North Carolina, with a 61-1/2-foot horizontal "coelostat." In this instrument, of a type now much employed in eclipse operations and first recommended by Professor Turner, a six-inch photographic objective preserved an invariable position, while a silvered plane mirror, revolving by clockwork once in forty-eight hours (since the angle of movement is doubled by reflection), supplied the light it brought to a focus. A temporary wooden tube connected the lens with the photographic house where the plates were exposed. Pictures thus obtained with exposures of from one to fourteen seconds, were described as "remarkably sharp and perfectly defined, showing the prominences and inner corona very beautifully. The polar fans came out magnificently."[583]

The great Sumatra eclipse left behind it manifold memories of foiled expectations. A totality of above six minutes drew observers to the Far East from several continents, each cherishing a plan of inquiry which few were destined to execute. All along the line of shadow, which, on May 18, 1901, crossed Reunion and Mauritius, and again met land at Sumatra and Borneo, the meteorological forecast was dubious, and the meteorological actuality in the main deplorable. Nevertheless, the corona was seen, and fairly well photographed through drifting clouds, and proved to resemble in essentials the appendage viewed a year previously. Negatives taken by members of the Lick Observatory expedition led by Mr. Perrine[584] disclosed the unique phenomenon of a violent coronal disturbance, with a small compact prominence as its apparent focus. Tumbling masses and irregular streamers radiating from a point subsequently shown by the Greenwich photographs to be the seat of a conspicuous spot, suggested the recent occurrence of an explosion, the far-reaching effects of which might be traced in the confused floccular luminosity of a vast surrounding region. Again, photographs in polarised light attested the radiance of the outer corona to be in large measure reflected, while that of the inner ring was original; and the inference was confirmed by spectrographs, recording many Fraunhofer lines when the slit lay far from the sun's limb, but none in its immediate vicinity. On plates exposed by Mr. Dyson and Dr. Humphrys with special apparatus, the coronal spectrum, continuous and linear, impressed itself more extensively in the ultra-violet than on any previous occasion; and Dr. Mitchell succeeded in photographing the reversing layer by means of a grating spectroscope. Finally, Mrs. Maunder, at Mauritius, despite mischievous atmospheric tremors, obtained with the Newbegin telescope an excellent series of coronal pictures.[585]

The principles of explanation applied to the corona may be briefly described as eruptive and electrical. The first was adopted by Professor Schaeberle in his "Mechanical Theory," advanced in 1890.[586] According to this view, the eclipse-halo consists of streams of matter shot out with great velocity from the spot-zones by forces acting perpendicularly to the sun's surface. The component particles return to the sun after describing sections of extremely elongated ellipses, unless their initial speed happen to equal or exceed the critical rate of 383 miles a second, in which case they are finally driven off into space. The perspective overlapping and interlacing of these incandescent outflows was supposed to occasion the intricacies of texture visible in the corona; and it should be recorded that a virtually identical conclusion was reached by Mr. Perrine in 1901,[587] by a different train of reasoning, based upon a distinct set of facts. A theory on very much the same lines was, moreover, worked out by M. Belopolsky in 1897.[588] Schaeberle, however, had the merit of making the first adequate effort to deduce the real shape of the corona, as it exists in three dimensions, from its projection upon the surface of the sphere. He failed, indeed, to account for the variation in coronal types by the changes in our situation with regard to the sun's equator. It is only necessary to remark that, if this were so, they should be subject to an annual periodicity, of which no trace can be discerned.

Electro-magnetic theories have the charm, and the drawback, of dealing largely with the unknown. But they are gradually losing the vague and intangible character which long clung to them; and the improved definition of their outlines has not, so far, brought them into disaccord with truth. The most promising hypothesis of the kind is due to Professor Bigelow of Washington. His able discussion of the eclipse photographs of January 1, 1889,[589] showed a striking agreement between the observed coronal forms and the calculated effects of a repulsive influence obeying the laws of electric potential, also postulated by Huggins in 1885.[590] Finely subdivided matter, expelled from the sun along lines of force emanating from the neighbourhood of his poles, thus tends to accumulate at "equipotential surfaces." In deference, however, to a doubt more strongly felt then than now, whether the presence of free electricity is compatible with the solar temperature, he avoided any express assertion that the coronal structure is an electrical phenomenon, merely pointing out that, if it were, its details would be just what they are.

Later, in 1892, Pupin in America,[591] and Ebert in Germany,[592] imitated the coronal streamers by means of electrical discharges in low vacua between small conducting bodies and strips of tinfoil placed on the outside of the containing glass receptacles. Finally, a critical experiment made by Ebert in 1895 served, as Bigelow justly said, "to clear up the entire subject, and put the theory on a working basis." Having obtained coronoidal effects in the manner described, he proceeded to subject them to the action of a strong magnetic field, with the result of marshalling the scattered rays into a methodical and highly suggestive array. They followed the direction of the magnetic lines of force, and, forsaking the polar collar of the magnetised sphere, surrounded it like a ruffle. The obvious analogy with the aurora polaris and the solar corona was insisted upon by Ebert himself, and has been further developed by Bigelow.[593] According to a recent modification of his hypothesis, the latter appendage is controlled by two opposing systems of forces; the magnetic causing the rays to diverge from the poles towards the equator, and the electrostatic urging their spread, through the mutual repulsion of the particles accumulated in the "wings," from the equator towards either pole. The cyclical change in the corona, he adds, is probably due to a variation in the balance of power thus established, the magnetic polar influence dominating at minima, the electrostatic at maxima. And he may well feel encouraged by the fortunate combination of many experimental details into one explanatory whole, no less than by the hopeful prospect of further developments, both practical and theoretical, along the same lines.

What we really know about the corona can be summed up in a few words. It is certainly not a solar atmosphere. It does not gravitate upon the sun's surface and share his rotation, as our air gravitates upon and shares the rotation of the earth; and this for the simple reason that there is no visible growth of pressure downwards (of which the spectroscope would infallibly give notice) in its gaseous constituents; whereas under the sole influence of the sun's attractive power, their density should be multiplied many million times in the descent through a mere fraction of their actual depth.[594]

They are apparently in a perpetual state of efflux from, and influx to our great luminary, under the stress of opposing forces. It is not unlikely that some part, at least, of the coronal materials are provided by eruptions from the body of the sun;[595] it is almost certain that they are organized and arranged round it through electro-magnetic action. This, however, would seem to be influential only upon their white-hot or reflective ingredients, out of which the streamers and aigrettes are composed; since the coronal gases appear, from observations during eclipses, to form a shapeless envelope, with condensations above the spot-zones, or at the bases of equatorial extensions. The corona is undoubtedly affected both in shape and constitution by the periodic ebb and flow of solar activity, its low-tide form being winged, its high-tide form stellate; while the rays emitted by the gases contained in it fade, and the continuous spectrum brightens, at times of minimum sun-spots. The appendage, as a whole, must be of inconceivable tenuity, since comets cut their way through it without experiencing sensible retardation. Not even Sir William Crookes's vacua can give an idea of the rarefaction which this fact implies. Yet the observed luminous effects may not in reality bear witness contradictory of it. One solitary molecule in each cubic inch of space might, in Professor Young's opinion, produce them; while in the same volume of ordinary air at the sea-level, the molecules number (according to Dr. Johnstone Stoney) 20,000 trillions!

The most important lesson, however, derived from eclipses is that of partial independence of them. Some of its fruits in the daily study of prominences the next chapter will collect; and the harvest has been rendered more abundant, as well as more valuable, since it has been found possible to enlist, in this department too, the versatile aid of the camera.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 512: Vierteljahrsschrift Astr. Ges., Jahrg. xxvi., p. 274.]

[Footnote 513: Astr. Jour., vol. iv., p. 33.]

[Footnote 514: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xvii., p. 116.]

[Footnote 515: Comptes Rendus, t. lxvii., p. 757.]

[Footnote 516: Comptes Rendus, t. lxvii., p. 839.]

[Footnote 517: Month. Not., vol. xxvii., p. 88.]

[Footnote 518: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xvii., p. 123.]

[Footnote 519: Washington Observations, 1867, App. ii., Harkness's Report, p. 60.]

[Footnote 520: Am. Jour., vol. xlviii. (2nd series), p. 377.]

[Footnote 521: Am. Jour., vol. xi. (3rd series), p. 429.]

[Footnote 522: Campbell, Astroph. Jour., vol. x., p. 186.]

[Footnote 523: Keeler, Reports on Eclipse of January 1, 1889, p. 47.]

[Footnote 524: Everything in such observations depends upon the proper manipulation of the slit of the spectroscope.]

[Footnote 525: Mem. R. A. S., vol. xli., p. 435.]

[Footnote 526: Comptes Rendus, t. lxvii., p. 1019.]

[Footnote 527: Mem. R. A. S., vol. xli., p. 43.]

[Footnote 528: Comptes Rendus, t. xciv., p. 1640.]

[Footnote 529: Young, Pop. Astr., Oct., 1897, p. 333.]

[Footnote 530: J. Evershed, Indian Eclipse, 1898, p. 65; _Month. Not._, vol. lviii., p. 298; Proc. Roy. Soc., Jan. 17, 1901.]

[Footnote 531: Frost, Astroph. Jour., vol. xii., p. 85; Lord, Ibid., vol. xiii., p. 149.]

[Footnote 532: Comptes Rendus, t. cxvii., No. 1; _Jour. Brit. Astr. Ass._, vol. iii., p. 532.]

[Footnote 533: Lockyer, Phil. Trans., vol. clvii., p. 551.]

[Footnote 534: The rosy envelope of prominence-matter was so named by Lockyer in 1868 (Phil. Trans., vol. clix., p. 430).]

[Footnote 535: According to Trouvelot (Wash. Obs., 1876, App. iii., p. 80), the subtracted matter was, at least to some extent, accumulated in the polar regions.]

[Footnote 536: Bull. Phil. Soc. Washington, vol. iii., p. 118.]

[Footnote 537: Mem. R. A. S., vol. xli., 1879.]

[Footnote 538: Astr. Nach., No. 1,737.]

[Footnote 539: Correspondence with Newton, pp. 181-184; Ranyard, Mem. Astr. Soc., vol. xli., p. 501.]

[Footnote 540: S. P. Langley, Wash. Obs., 1876, App. iii., p. 209; Nature, vol. lxi., p. 443.]

[Footnote 541: Schuster (Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xxxv., p. 154) measured and photographed about thirty.]

[Footnote 542: Abney, Phil. Trans., vol. clxxv., p. 267.]

[Footnote 543: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xxxiv., p. 409. Experiments directed to the same end had been made by Dr. O. Lohse at Potsdam, 1878-80. Astr. Nach., No. 2,486.]

[Footnote 544: The sensitiveness of chloride of silver extends from h to H; that is, over the upper or more refrangible half of the space in which the main part of the coronal light is concentrated.]

[Footnote 545: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xxxiv., p. 414.]

[Footnote 546: Report Brit. Assoc., 1883, p. 351.]

[Footnote 547: Maunder, Indian Eclipse, p. 125; Eclipse of 1900, p. 143.]

[Footnote 548: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xiii., p. 662.]

[Footnote 549: See infra, p. 197.]

[Footnote 550: Abney, Phil. Trans., vol. clxxx., p. 119.]

[Footnote 551: Comptes Rendus, t. xcvii., p. 592.]

[Footnote 552: Memoirs National Ac. of Sciences, vol. ii., p. 102.]

[Footnote 553: Wash. Obs., 1867, App. ii., p. 64.]

[Footnote 554: The Sun, p. 357.]

[Footnote 555: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xvii., p. 289.]

[Footnote 556: Comptes Rendus, t. lxxiii., p. 434.]

[Footnote 557: Wash. Obs., 1867, App. ii., p. 195.]

[Footnote 558: Stokes, Anniversary Address, Nature, vol. xxxv., p. 114.]

[Footnote 559: Comptes Rendus, t. ci., p. 50.]

[Footnote 560: Harvard Annals, vol. xviii., p. 99.]

[Footnote 561: Wesley, Phil. Trans., vol. clxxx., p. 350.]

[Footnote 562: Harvard Annals, vol. xviii, p. 108.]

[Footnote 563: Lick Report, p. 20.]

[Footnote 564: Ibid., p. 14.]

[Footnote 565: Ibid., p. 155.]

[Footnote 566: Pub. Astr. Soc. of the Pacific, vol. iii., p. 158.]

[Footnote 567: Professor Holden concluded, with less qualification, "that so-called 'polar' rays exist at all latitudes on the sun's surface." Lick Report, p. 19.]

[Footnote 568: Holden, Report on Eclipse of December, 1889, p. 18; Charroppin, Pub. Astr. Soc. of the Pacific, vol. iii., p. 26.]

[Footnote 569: Published as the Frontispiece to the Observatory, No. 160.]

[Footnote 570: Wesley, Ibid., p. 107.]

[Footnote 571: Lick Observatory Contributions, No. 4, p. 108.]

[Footnote 572: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xiii. p. 307.]

[Footnote 573: Lockyer, Phil. Trans., vol. clxxxvii., p. 592.]

[Footnote 574: He died in London, November 20, 1898.]

[Footnote 575: Bull. Acad. St. Petersbourg, t. vi., p. 253.]

[Footnote 576: W. H. Wesley, Phil. Trans., vol. cxc, p. 204.]

[Footnote 577: Lick Reports on Eclipse of January 1, 1889, p. 204.]

[Footnote 578: Astroph. Jour., vol. xi., p. 226.]

[Footnote 579: Observatory, vol. xxi., p. 157.]

[Footnote 580: The Indian Eclipse, 1898, p. 114.]

[Footnote 581: Science, June 22, 1900; Astroph. Jour., vol. xii., p. 370.]

[Footnote 582: Ann. der Physik, Bd. xlviii., p. 528. See also Wood, Physical Review, vol. iv., p. 191, 1896.]

[Footnote 583: Science, August 3, 1900.]

[Footnote 584: Lick Observatory Bulletin, No. 9.]

[Footnote 585: Observatory, vol. xxiv., pp. 321, 375.]

[Footnote 586: Lick Report on Eclipse of December 22, 1889, p. 47; Month. Not., vol. l., p. 372.]

[Footnote 587: Lick Obs. Bull., No. 9.]

[Footnote 588: Bull. de l'Acad. St. Petersbourg, t. iv., p. 289.]

[Footnote 589: The Solar Corona discussed by Spherical Harmonics, Smithsonian Institution, 1889.]

[Footnote 590: Bakerian Lecture, Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xxxix.]

[Footnote 591: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., p. 483.]

[Footnote 592: Ibid., vol. xii., p. 804.]

[Footnote 593: Am. Journ. of Science, vol. xi., p. 253, 1901.]

[Footnote 594: See Huggins, Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xxxix., p. 108; Young, North Am. Review, February, 1885, p. 179.]

[Footnote 595: Professor W. A. Norton, of Yale College, appears to have been the earliest formal advocate of the Expulsion Theory of the solar surroundings, in the second (1845) and later editions of his Treatise on Astronomy.]

Chapter IV

SOLAR SPECTROSCOPY

The new way struck out by Janssen and Lockyer was at once and eagerly followed. In every part of Europe, as well as in North America, observers devoted themselves to the daily study of the chromosphere and prominences. Foremost among these were Lockyer in England, Zoellner at Leipzig, Spoerer at Anclam, Young at Hanover, New Hampshire, Secchi and Respighi at Rome. There were many others, but these names stood out conspicuously.

The first point to be cleared up was that of chemical composition. Leisurely measurements verified the presence above the sun's surface of hydrogen in prodigious volumes, but showed that sodium had nothing to do with the orange-yellow ray identified with it in the haste of the eclipse. From its vicinity to the D-pair (than which it is slightly more refrangible), the prominence-line was, however, designated D_3, and the unknown substance emitting it was named by Lockyer "helium." Its terrestrial discovery ensued after twenty-six years. In March, 1895, Professor Ramsay obtained from the rare mineral clevite a volatile gas, the spectrum of which was found to include the yellow prominence-ray. Helium was actually at hand, and available for examination. The identification cleared up many obscurities in chromospheric chemistry. Several bright lines, persistently seen at the edge of the sun, and early suspected by Young[596] to emanate from the same source as D_3, were now derived from helium in the laboratory; and all the complex emissions of that exotic substance ranged themselves into six sets or series, the members of which are mutually connected by numerical relations of a definite and simple kind. Helium is of rather more than twice the density of hydrogen, and has no chemical affinities. In almost evanescent quantities it lurks in the earth's crust, and is diffused through the earth's atmosphere.

The importance of the part played in the prominence-spectrum by the violet line of calcium was noticed by Professor Young in 1872, but since H and K lie near the limit of the visible spectrum, photography was needed for a thorough investigation of their appearances. Aided by its resources, Professor George E. Hale, then at the beginning of his career, detected in 1889 their unfailing and conspicuous presence.[597] The substance emitting them not only constitutes a fundamental ingredient of the chromosphere, but rises, in the fantastic jets thence issuing, to greater heights than hydrogen itself. The isolation of H and K in solar prominences from any other of the lines usually distinctive of calcium was experimentally proved by Sir William and Lady Huggins in 1897 to be due to the extreme tenuity of the emitting vapour.[598]

Hydrogen, helium, and calcium form, then, the chief and unvarying materials of the solar sierra and its peaks; but a number of metallic elements make their appearance spasmodically under the influence of disturbances in the layers beneath. In September, 1871, Young[599] drew up at Dartmouth College a list of 103 lines significant of injections into the chromosphere of iron, titanium, chromium, magnesium, and many other substances. During two months' observation in the pure air of Mount Sherman (8,335 feet high) in the summer of 1872, these tell-tale lines mounted up to 273;[600] and he believes their number might still be doubled by steady watching. Indeed, both Young and Lockyer have more than once seen the whole field of the spectroscope momentarily inundated with bright rays, as if the "reversing layer" had been suddenly thrust upwards into the chromosphere, and as quickly allowed to drop back again. The opinion would thus appear to be well-grounded that the two form one continuous region, of which the lower parts are habitually occupied by the heaviest vapours, but where orderly arrangement is continually overturned by violent eruptive disturbances.

The study of the forms of prominences practically began with Huggins's observation of one through an "open slit" February 13, 1869.[601] At first it had been thought possible to examine them only in sections--that is, by admitting mere narrow strips or "lines" of their various kinds of light; while the actual shape of the objects emitting those lines had been arrived at by such imperfect devices as that of giving to the slit of the spectroscope a vibratory moment rapid enough to enable the eye to retain the impression of one part while others were successively presented to it. It was an immense gain to find that their rays had strength to bear so much of dilution with ordinary light as was involved in opening the spectroscopic shutter wide enough to exhibit the tree-like, or horn-like, or flame-shaped bodies rising over the sun's rim in their undivided proportions. Several diversely-coloured images of them are formed in the spectroscope; each may be seen under a crimson, a yellow, a green, and a deep blue aspect. The crimson, however (built up out of the C-line of hydrogen), is the most intense, and is commonly used for purposes of observation and illustration.

Friedrich Zoellner was, by a few days, beforehand with Huggins in describing the open-slit method, but was somewhat less prompt in applying it. His first survey of a complete prominence, pictured in, and not simply intersected by, the slit of his spectroscope, was obtained July 1, 1869.[602] Shortly afterwards the plan was successfully adopted by the whole band of investigators.

A difference in kind was very soon perceived to separate these objects into two well-marked classes. Its natural and obvious character was shown by its having struck several observers independently. The distinction of "cloud-prominences" from "flame-prominences" was announced by Lockyer, April 27; by Zoellner, June 2; and by Respighi, December 4, 1870.

The first description are tranquil and relatively permanent, sometimes enduring without striking change for many days. Certain of the included species mimic terrestrial cloud-scenery--now appearing like fleecy cirrus transpenetrated with the red glow of sunset--now like prodigious masses of cumulo-stratus hanging heavily above the horizon. The solar clouds, however, have the peculiarity of possessing stems. Slender columns can ordinarily be seen to connect the surface of the chromosphere with its outlying portions. Hence the fantastic likeness to forest scenery presented by the long ranges of fiery trunks and foliage occasionally seeming to fringe the sun's limb. But while this mode of structure suggests an actual outpouring of incandescent material, certain facts require a different interpretation. At a distance, and quite apart from the chromosphere, prominences have been perceived, both by Secchi and Young, to form, just as clouds form in a clear sky, condensation being replaced by ignition. Filaments were then thrown out downward towards the chromosphere, and finally the usual appearance of a "stemmed prominence" was assumed. Still more remarkable was an observation made by Trouvelot at Harvard College Observatory, June 26, 1874.[603] A gigantic comma-shaped prominence, 82,000 miles high, vanished from before his eyes by a withdrawal of light as sudden as the passage of a flash of lightning. The same observer has frequently witnessed a gradual illumination or gradual extinction of such objects, testifying to changes in the thermal or electrical condition of matter already in situ.

The first photograph of a prominence, as shown by the spectroscope in daylight, was taken by Professor Young in 1870.[604] But neither his method, nor that described by Dr. Braun in 1872,[605] had any practical success. This was reserved to reward the efforts towards the same end of Professor Hale. Begun at Harvard College in 1889,[606] they were prosecuted soon afterwards at the Kenwood Observatory, Chicago. The great difficulty was to extricate the coloured image of the gaseous structure, spectroscopically visible at the sun's limb, from the encompassing glare, a very little of which goes a long way in fogging sensitive plates. To counteract its mischievous effects, a second slit,[607] besides the usual narrow one in front of the collimator, was placed on guard, as it were, behind the dispersing apparatus, so as to shut out from the sensitised surface all light save that of the required quality. The sun's image being then allowed to drift across the outer slit, while the plate holder was kept moving at the same rate, the successive sectional impressions thus rapidly obtained finally "built up" a complete picture of the prominence. Another expedient was soon afterwards contrived.[608] The H and K rays of calcium are always, as we have seen, bright in the spectrum of prominences. They are besides fine and sharp, while the corresponding absorption-lines in the ordinary solar spectrum are wide and diffuse. Hence, prominences formed by the spectroscope out of these particular qualities of violet light, can be photographed entire and at once, for the simple reason that they are projected upon a naturally darkened background. Atmospheric glare is abolished by local absorption. This beautiful method was first realised by Professor Hale in June, 1891.

A "spectroheliograph," consisting of a spectroscopic and a photographic apparatus of special type, attached to the eye-end of an equatoreal twelve inches in aperture, was erected at Kenwood in March, 1891; and with its aid, Professor Hale entered upon original researches of high promise for the advancement of solar physics. Noteworthy above all is his achievement of photographing both prominences and faculae on the very face of the sun. The latter had, until then, been very imperfectly observed. They were only visible, in fact, when relieved by their brilliancy against the dusky edge of the solar disc. Their convenient emission of calcium light, however, makes it possible to photograph them in all positions, and emphasises their close relationship to prominences. The simultaneous picturing, moreover, of the entire chromospheric ring, with whatever trees or fountains of fire chance to be at the moment issuing from it, has been accomplished by a very simple device. The disc of the sun itself having been screened with a circular metallic diaphragm, it is only necessary to cause the slit to traverse the virtually eclipsed luminary, in order to get an impression of the whole round of its fringing appendages. And the record can be extended to the disc by removing the screen, and carrying the slit back at a quicker rate, when an "image of the sun's surface, with the faculae and spots, is formed on the plate exactly within the image of the chromosphere formed during the first exposure. The whole operation," Professor Hale continues, "is completed in less than a minute, and the resulting photographs give the first true pictures of the sun, showing all of the various phenomena at its surface."[609] Most of these novel researches were, by a remarkable coincidence, pursued independently and contemporaneously by M. Deslandres, of the Paris Observatory.[610]

The ultra-violet prominence spectrum was photographed for the first time from an uneclipsed sun, in June, 1891, at Chicago. Besides H and K, four members of the Huggins-series of hydrogen-lines imprinted themselves on the plate.[611] Meanwhile M. Deslandres was enabled, by fitting quartz lenses to his spectroscope, and substituting a reflecting for a refracting telescope, to get rid of the obstructive action of glass upon the shorter light-waves, and thus to widen the scope of his inquiry into the peculiarities of those derived from prominences.[612] As the result, not only all the nine white-star lines were photographed from a brilliant sun-flame, but five additional ones were found to continue the series upward. The wave-lengths of these last had, moreover, been calculated beforehand with singular exactness, from a simple formula known as "Balmer's Law."[613] The new lines, accordingly, filled places in a manner already prepared for them, and were thus unmistakably associated with the hydrogen-spectrum. This is now known to be represented in prominences by twenty-seven lines,[614] forming a kind of harmonic progression, only four of which are visibly darkened in the Fraunhofer spectrum of the sun.

PLATE I.

The chemistry of "cloud-prominences" is simple. Hydrogen, helium, and calcium are their chief constituents. "Flame-prominences," on the other hand, show, in addition, the characteristic rays of a number of metals, among which iron, titanium, barium, strontium, sodium, and magnesium are conspicuous. They are intensely brilliant; sharply defined in their varying forms of jets, spikes, fountains, waterspouts; of rapid formation and speedy dissolution, seldom attaining to the vast dimensions of the more tranquil kind. Eruptive or explosive by origin, they occur in close connection with spots; whether causally, the materials ejected as "flames" cooling and settling down as dark, depressed patches of increased absorption;[615] or consequentially, as a reactive effect of falls of solidified substances from great heights in the solar atmosphere.[616] The two classes of phenomena, at any rate, stand in a most intimate relation; they obey the same law of periodicity, and are confined to the same portions of the sun's surface, while quiescent prominences may be found right up to the poles and close to the equator.

The general distribution of prominences, including both genera, follows that of faculae much more closely than that of spots. From Father Secchi's and Professor Respighi's observations, 1869-71, were derived the first clear ideas on the subject, which have been supplemented and modified by the later researches of Professors Tacchini and Ricco at Rome and Palermo. The results are somewhat complicated, but may be stated broadly as follows. The district of greatest prominence-frequency covers and overlaps by several degrees that of the greatest spot-frequency. That is to say, it extends to about 40 deg. north and south of the equator.[617] There is a visible tendency to a second pair of maxima nearer the poles. The poles themselves, as well as the equator, are regions of minimum occurrence. Distribution in time is governed by the spot-cycle, but the maximum lasts longer for prominences than for spots.

The structure of the chromosphere was investigated in 1869 and subsequent years by Professor Respighi, director of the Capitoline Observatory, as well as by Spoerer, and Bredikhine of the Moscow Observatory. They found this supposed solar envelope to be of the same eruptive nature as the vast protrusions from it, and to be made up of a congeries of minute flames[618] set close together like blades of grass. "The appearance," Professor Young writes,[619] "which probably indicates a fact, is as if countless jets of heated gas were issuing through vents and spiracles over the whole surface, thus clothing it with flame which heaves and tosses like the blaze of a conflagration."

The summits of these filaments of fire are commonly inclined, as if by a wind sweeping over them, when the sun's activity is near its height, but erect during his phase of tranquillity. Spoerer, in 1871, inferred the influence of permanent polar currents,[620] but Tacchini showed in 1876 that the deflections upon which this inference was based ceased to be visible as the spot-minimum drew near.[621]

Another peculiarity of the chromosphere, denoting the remoteness of its character from that of a true atmosphere,[622] is the irregularity of its distribution over the sun's surface. There are no signs of its bulging out at the equator, as the laws of fluid equilibrium in a rotating mass would require; but there are some that the fluctuations in its depth are connected with the phases of solar agitation. At times of minimum it seems to accumulate and concentrate its activity at the poles; while maxima probably bring a more equable general distribution, with local depressions at the base of great prominences and above spots.

A low-lying stratum of carbon-vapour was, in 1897, detected in the chromosphere by Professor Hale with a grating-spectroscope attached to the 40-inch Yerkes refractor.[623] The eclipse-photographs of 1893 disclosed to Hartley's examination the presence there of gallium;[624] and those taken by Evershed in 1898 were found by Jewell[625] to be crowded with ultra-violet lines of the equally rare metal scandium. The general rule had been laid down by Sir Norman Lockyer that the metallic radiations from the chromosphere are those "enhanced" in the electric spark.[626] Hence, the comparative study of conditions prevalent in the arc and the spark has acquired great importance in solar physics.

The reality of the appearance of violent disturbance presented by the "flaming" kind of prominence can be tested in a very remarkable manner. Christian Doppler,[627] professor of mathematics at Prague, enounced in 1842 the theorm that the colour of a luminous body, like the pitch of a sonorous body, must be changed by movements of approach or recession. The reason is this. Both colour and pitch are physiological effects, depending, not upon absolute wave-length, but upon the number of waves entering the eye or ear in a given interval of time. And this number, it is easy to see, must be increased if the source of light or sound is diminishing its distance, and diminished if it is decreasing it. In the one case, the vibrating body pursues and crowds together the waves emanating from it; in the other, it retreats from them, and so lengthens out the space covered by an identical number. The principle may be thus illustrated. Suppose shots to be fired at a target at fixed intervals of time. If the marksman advances, say twenty paces between each discharge of his rifle, it is evident that the shots will fall faster on the target than if he stood still; if, on the contrary, he retires by the same amount, they will strike at correspondingly longer intervals. The result will of course be the same whether the target or the marksman be in movement.

So far Doppler was altogether right. As regards sound, anyone can convince himself that the effect he predicted is a real one, by listening to the alternate shrilling and sinking of the steam-whistle when an express train rushes through a station. But in applying this principle to the colours of stars he went widely astray; for he omitted from consideration the double range of invisible vibrations which partake of, and to the eye exactly compensate, changes of refrangibility in the visible rays. There is, then, no possibility of finding a criterion of velocity in the hue of bodies shining, like the sun and stars, with continuous light. The entire spectrum is slightly shifted up or down in the scale of refrangibility; certain rays normally visible become exalted or degraded (as the case may be) into invisibility, and certain other rays at the opposite end undergo the converse process; but the sum total of impressions on the retina continues the same.

We are not, however, without the means of measuring this sub-sensible transportation of the light-gamut. Once more the wonderful Fraunhofer lines came to the rescue. They were called by the earlier physicists "fixed lines;" but it is just because they are not fixed that, in this instance, we find them useful. They share, and in sharing betray, the general shift of the spectrum. This aspect of Doppler's principle was adverted to by Fizeau in 1848,[628] and the first tangible results in the estimation of movements of approach and recession between the earth and the stars, were communicated by Sir William Huggins to the Royal Society, April 23, 1868. Eighteen months later, Zoellner devised his "reversion-spectroscope"[629] for doubling the measurable effects of line-displacements; aided by which ingenious instrument, and following a suggestion of its inventor, Professor H. C. Vogel succeeded at Bothkamp, June 9, 1871,[630] in detecting effects of that nature due to the solar rotation. This application constitutes at once the test and the triumph of the method.[631]

The eastern edge of the sun is continually moving towards us with an equatorial speed of about a mile and a quarter per second, the western edge retreating at the same rate. The displacements--towards the violet on the east, towards the red on the west--corresponding to this velocity are very small; so small that it seems hardly credible that they should have been laid bare to perception. They amount to but 1/150th part of the interval between the two constituents of the D-line of sodium; and the D-line of sodium itself can be separated into a pair only by a powerful spectroscope. Nevertheless, Professor Young[632] was able to show quite satisfactorily, in 1876, not only deviations in the solar lines from their proper places indicating a velocity of rotation (1.42 miles per second) slightly in excess of that given by observations of spots, but the exemption of terrestrial lines (those produced by absorption in the earth's atmosphere) from the general push upwards or downwards. Shortly afterwards, Professor Langley, then director of the Allegheny Observatory, having devised a means of comparing with great accuracy light from different portions of the sun's disc, found that while the obscure rays in two juxtaposed spectra derived from the solar poles were absolutely continuous, no sooner was the instrument rotated through 90 deg., so as to bring its luminous supplies from opposite extremities of the equator, than the same rays became perceptibly "notched." The telluric lines, meanwhile, remained unaffected, so as to be "virtually mapped" by the process.[633] This rapid and unfailing mode of distinction was used by Cornu with perfect ease during his investigation of atmospheric absorption near Loiret in August and September, 1883.[634]

A beautiful experiment of the same kind was performed by M. Thollon, of M. Bischoffsheim's observatory at Nice, in the summer of 1880.[635] He confined his attention to one delicately defined group of four lines in the orange, of which the inner pair are solar (iron) and the outer terrestrial. At the centre of the sun the intervals separating them were sensibly equal; but when the light was taken alternately from the right and left limbs, a relative shift in alternate directions of the solar, towards and from the stationary telluric rays became apparent. A parallel observation was made at Dunecht, December 14, 1883, when it was noticed that a strong iron-line in the yellow part of the solar spectrum is permanently double on the sun's eastern, but single on his western limb;[636] opposite motion-displacements bringing about this curious effect of coincidence with, and separation from, an adjacent stationary line of our own atmosphere's production, according as the spectrum is derived from the retreating or advancing margin of the solar globe. Statements of fact so precise and authoritative amount to a demonstration that results of this kind are worthy of confidence; and they already occupy an important place among astronomical data.

The subtle method of which they served to assure the validity was employed in 1887-9 by M. Duner to test and extend Carrington's and Spoerer's conclusions as to the anomalous nature of the sun's axial movement.[637] His observations for the purpose, made with a fine diffraction-spectroscope, just then mounted at the observatory of Upsala, were published in 1891.[638] Their upshot was to confirm and widen the law of retardation with increasing latitude derived from the progressive motions of spots. Determinations made within 15 deg. of the pole, consequently far beyond the region of spots, gave a rotation-period of 38-1/2, that of the equatorial belt being of 25-1/2 days. Spots near the equator indeed complete their rounds in a period shorter by at least half a day; and proportionate differences were found to exist elsewhere in corresponding latitudes; but Duner's observations, it must be remembered, apply to a distinct part of the complex solar machine from the disturbed photospheric surface. It is amply possible that the absorptive strata producing the Fraunhofer lines, significant, by their varying displacements at either limb, of the inferred varying rates of rotation, may gyrate more slowly than the spot-generating level. Moreover, faculae appear to move at a quicker pace than either;[639] so that we have, for three solar formations, three different periods of average rotation, the shortest of which belongs to the faculae, one of intermediate length to the spots, and the most protracted to the reversing layer. All, however, agree in lengthening progressively from the equator towards the poles. Professor Holden aptly compared the sun to "a vast whirlpool where the velocities of rotation depend not only on the situation of the rotating masses as to latitude, but also as to depth beneath the exterior surface."[640]

Sir Norman Lockyer[641] promptly perceived the applicability of the surprising discovery of line-shiftings through end-on motion to the study of prominences, the discontinuous light of which affords precisely the same means of detecting movement without seeming change of place, as do lines of absorption in a continuous spectrum. Indeed, his observations at the sun's edge almost compelled recourse to an explanation made available just when the need of it began to be felt. He saw bright lines, not merely pushed aside from their normal places by a barely perceptible amount, but bent, torn, broken, as if by the stress of some tremendous violence. These remarkable appearances were quite simply interpreted as the effects of movements varying in amount and direction in the different parts of the extensive mass of incandescent vapours falling within a single field of view. Very commonly they are of a cyclonic character. The opposite distortions of the same coloured rays betray the fury of "counter-gales" rushing along at the rate of 120 miles a second; while their undisturbed sections prove the persistence of a "heart of peace" in the midst of that unimaginable fiery whirlwind. Velocities up to 250 miles a second, or 15,000 times that of an express train at the top of its speed, were thus observed by Young during his trip to Mount Sherman, August 2, 1872; and these were actually doubled in an extraordinary outburst observed by Father Jules Fenyi, on June 17, 1891, at the Haynald Observatory in Hungary, as well as by M. Trouvelot at Meudon.[642]

Motions ascertainable in this way near the limb are, of course, horizontal as regards the sun's surface; the analogies they present might, accordingly, be styled meteorological rather than volcanic. But vertical displacements on a scale no less stupendous can also be shown to exist. Observations of the spectra of spots centrally situated (where motions in the line of sight are vertical) disclose the progress of violent uprushes and downrushes of ignited gases, for the most part in the penumbral or outlying districts. They appear to be occasioned by fitful and irregular disturbances, and have none of the systematic quality which would be required for the elucidation of sun-spot theories. Indeed, they almost certainly take place at a great height above the actual openings in the photosphere.

As to vertical motions above the limb, on the other hand, we have direct visual evidence of a truly amazing kind. The projected glowing matter has, by the aid of the spectroscope, been watched in its ascent. On September 7, 1871, Young examined at noon a vast hydrogen cloud 100,000 miles long, as it showed to the eye, and 54,000 high. It floated tranquilly above the chromosphere at an elevation of some 15,000 miles, and was connected with it by three or four upright columns, presenting the not uncommon aspect compared by Lockyer to that of a grove of banyans. Called away for a few minutes at 12.30, on returning at 12.55 the observer found--

"That in the meantime the whole thing had been literally blown to shreds by some inconceivable uprush from beneath. In place of the quiet cloud I had left, the air, if I may use the expression, was filled with flying debris--a mass of detached, vertical, fusiform filaments, each from 10" to 30" long by 2" or 3" wide,[643] brighter and closer together where the pillars had formerly stood, and rapidly ascending. They rose, with a velocity estimated at 166 miles a second, to fully 200,000 miles above the sun's surface, then gradually faded away like a dissolving cloud, and at 1.15 only a few filmy wisps, with some brighter streamers low down near the photosphere, remained to mark the place."[644]

A velocity of projection of at least 500 miles per second was, by Proctor's[645] calculation, required to account for this extraordinary display, to which the earth immediately responded by a magnetic disturbance, and a fine aurora. It has proved by no means an isolated occurrence. Young saw its main features repeated, October 7, 1881,[646] on a still vaster scale; for the exploded prominence attained, this time, an altitude of 350,000 miles--the highest yet chronicled. Lockyer, moreover, has seen a prominence 40,000 miles high shattered in ten minutes; while uprushes have been witnessed by Respighi, of which the initial velocities were judged by him to be 400 or 500 miles a second. When it is remembered that a body starting from the sun's surface at the rate of 383 miles a second would, if it encountered no resistance, escape for ever from his control, it is obvious that we have, in the enormous forces of eruption or repulsion manifested in the outbursts just described, the means of accounting for the vast diffusion of matter in the solar neighbourhood. Nor is it possible to explain them away, as Cornu,[647] Faye,[648] and others have sought to do, by substituting for the rush of matter in motion, progressive illumination through electric discharges, chemical processes,[649] or even through the mere reheating of gases cooled by expansion.[650] All the appearances are against such evasions of the difficulty presented by velocities stigmatised as "fabulous" and "improbable," but which, there is the strongest reason to believe, really exist.

On the 12th of December, 1878, Sir Norman Lockyer formally expounded before the Royal Society his hypothesis of the compound nature of the "chemical elements."[651] An hypothesis, it is true, over and over again propounded from the simply terrestrial point of view. What was novel was the supra-terrestrial evidence adduced in its support; and even this had been, in a general and speculative way, anticipated by Professor F. W. Clarke of Washington.[652] Lockyer had been led to his conclusion along several converging lines of research. In a letter to M. Dumas, dated December 3, 1873, he had sketched out the successive stages of "celestial dissociation" which he conceived to be represented in the sun and stars. The absence from the solar spectrum of metalloidal absorption he explained by the separation, in the fierce solar furnace, of such substances as oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and chlorine, into simpler constituents possessing unknown spectra; while metals were at that time still admitted to be capable of existing there in a state of integrity. Three years later he shifted his position onward. He announced, as the result of a comparative study of the Fraunhofer and electric-arc spectra of calcium, that the "molecular grouping" of that metal, which at low temperatures gives a spectrum with its chief line in the blue, is nearly broken up in the sun into another or others with lines in the violet.[653] This came to be regarded by him as "a truly typical case."[654]

During four years (1875-78 inclusive) this diligent observer was engaged in mapping a section of the more refrangible part of the solar spectrum (wave-lengths 3,800-4,000) on a scale of magnitude such that, if completed down to the infra-red, its length would have been about half a furlong. The attendant laborious investigation, by the aid of photography, of metallic spectra, seemed to indicate the existence of what he called "basic lines." These held their ground persistently in the spectra of two or more metals after all possible "impurities" had been eliminated, and were therefore held to attest the presence of a common substratum of matter in a simpler state of aggregation than any with which we are ordinarily acquainted.

Later inquiries have shown, however, that between the spectral lines of different substances there are probably no absolute coincidences. "Basic" lines are really formed of doublets or triplets merged together by insufficient dispersion. Of Thalen's original list of seventy rays common to several spectra,[655] very few resisted Thollon's and Young's powerful spectroscopes; and the process of resolution was completed by Rowland. Thus the argument from community of lines to community of substance has virtually collapsed. It was replaced by one founded on certain periodical changes on the spectra of sun-spots. They emerged from a series of observations begun at South Kensington under Sir Norman Lockyer's direction in 1879, and continued for fifteen years.[656]

The principle of the method employed is this. The whole range of Fraunhofer lines is visible when the light from a spot is examined with the spectroscope; but relatively few are widened. Now these widened lines alone constitute (presumably) the true spot-spectrum; they, and they alone, tell what kinds of vapour are thrust down into the strange dusky pit of the nucleus, the unaffected lines taking their accustomed origin from the over-lying strata of the normal solar atmosphere. Here then we have the criterion that was wanted--the means of distinguishing, spectroscopically and chemically, between the cavity and the absorbing layers piled up above it. By its persistent employment some marked peculiarities have been brought out, such as the unfamiliar character of numerous lines in spot-spectra, especially at epochs of disturbance; and the strange individuality in the behaviour of every one of these darkened and distended rays. Each seems to act on its own account; it comports itself as if it were the sole representative of the substance emitting it; its appearance is unconditioned by that of any of its terrestrial companions in the same spectrum.

The most curious fact, however, elicited by these inquiries was that of the attendance of chemical vicissitudes upon the advance of the sun-spot period. As the maximum approached, unknown replaced known components of the spot-spectra in a most pronounced and unmistakable way.[657] It seemed as if the vapours emitting lines of iron, titanium, nickel, etc., had ceased to exist as such, and their room been taken by others, total strangers in terrestrial laboratories. These were held by Lockyer to be simply the finer constituents of their predecessors, dissociation having been effected by the higher temperature ensuing upon increased solar activity. But Father Cortie's supplementary investigations at Stonyhurst[658] modified, while they in the main substantiated, the South Kensington results. They showed that the substitution of unknown for known lines characterizes disturbed spots, at all stages of the solar cycle, so that no systematic course of chemical change can be said to affect the sun as a whole. They showed further[659]--from evidence independent of that obtained by Young in 1892[660]--the remarkable conspicuousness in spot-spectra of vanadium lines excessively faint in the Fraunhofer spectrum. Lockyer's "unknown lines" may probably thus be accounted for. They represent absorption, not by new, but by scarce elements, especially, Father Cortie thinks, those with atomic weights of about 50. The circumstance of their development in solar commotions, largely to the exclusion of iron, is none the less curious; but it cannot be explained by any process of dissociation.

The theory has, however, to be considered under still another aspect. It frequently happens that the contortions or displacements due to motion are seen to affect a single line belonging to a particular substance, while the other lines of that same substance remain imperturbable. Now, how is this most singular fact, which seems at first sight to imply that a body may be at rest and in motion at one and the same instant, to be accounted for? It is accounted for, on the present hypothesis, easily enough, by supposing that the rays thus discrepant in their testimony, do not belong to one kind of matter, but to several, combined at ordinary temperatures to form a body in appearance "elementary." Of these different vapours, one or more may of course be rushing rapidly towards or from the observer, while the others remain still; and since the line of sight across the average prominence-region penetrates, at the sun's edge, a depth of about 300,000 miles,[661] all the incandescent materials separately occurring along which line are projected into a single "flame" or "cloud," it will be perceived that there is ample room for diversities of behaviour.

The alternative mode of escape from the perplexity consists in assuming that the vapour in motion is rendered luminous under conditions which reduce its spectrum to a few rays, the unaffected lines being derived from a totally distinct mass of the same substance shining with its ordinary emissions.[662] Thus, calcium can be rendered virtually monochromatic by attenuation, and analogous cases are not rare.

Sir Norman Lockyer only asks us to believe that effects which follow certain causes on the earth are carried a stage further in the sun, where the same causes must be vastly intensified. We find that the bodies we call "compound" split asunder at fixed degrees of heat within the range of our resources. Why should we hesitate to admit that the bodies we call "simple" do likewise at degrees of heat without the range of our resources? The term "element" simply expresses terrestrial incapability of reduction. That, in celestial laboratories, the means and their effect here absent should be present, would be an inference challenging, in itself, no expression of incredulity.

There are indeed theoretical objections to it which, though probably not insuperable, are unquestionably grave. Our seventy chemical "elements," for instance, are placed by the law of specific heats on a separate footing from their known compounds. We are not, it is true, compelled by it to believe their atoms to be really and absolutely such--to contain, that is, the "irreducible minimum" of material substance; but we do certainly gather from it that they are composed on a different principle from the salts and oxides made and unmade at pleasure by chemists. Then the multiplication of the species of matter with which Lockyer's results menace us, is at first sight startling. They may lead, we are told, to eventual unification, but the prospect appears remote. Their only obvious outcome is the disruption into several constituents of each terrestrial "element." The components of iron alone should be counted by the dozen. And there are other metals, such as cerium, which, giving a still more complex spectrum, would doubtless be still more numerously resolved. Sir Norman Lockyer interprets the observed phenomena as indicating the successive combinations, in varying proportions, of a very few original ingredients;[663] but no definite sign of their existence is perceptible; "protyle" seems likely long to evade recognition; and the only intelligible underlying principle for the reasonings employed--that of "one line, one element"--implies a throng beyond counting of formative material units.

Thus, added complexity is substituted for that fundamental unity of matter which has long formed the dream of speculators. And it is extremely remarkable that Sir William Crookes, working along totally different lines, has been led to analogous conclusions. To take only one example. As the outcome of extremely delicate operations of sifting and testing carried on for years, he finds that the metal yttrium splits up into five, if not eight constituents.[664] Evidently, old notions are doomed, nor are any preconceived ones likely to take their place. It would seem, on the contrary, as if their complete reconstruction were at hand. Subversive facts are steadily accumulating; the revolutionary ideas springing from them tend, if we interpret them aright, towards the substitution of electrical for chemical theories of matter. Dissociation by the brute force of heat is already nearly superseded, in the thoughts of physicists, by the more delicate process of "ionisation." Precisely what this implies and involves we do not know; but the symptoms of its occurrence are probably altogether different from those gathered by Sir Norman Lockyer from the collation of celestial spectra.

A. J. Angstrom of Upsala takes rank after Kirchhoff as a subordinate founder, so to speak, of solar spectroscopy. His great map of the "normal" solar spectrum[665] was published in 1868, two years before he died. Robert Thalen was his coadjutor in its execution, and the immense labour which it cost was amply repaid by its eminent and lasting usefulness. For more than a score of years it held its ground as the universal standard of reference in all spectroscopic inquiries within the range of the visible emanations. Those that are invisible by reason of the quickness of their vibrations were mapped by Dr. Henry Draper, of New York, in 1873, and with superior accuracy by M. Cornu in 1881. The infra-red part of the spectrum, investigated by Langley, Abney, and Knut Angstrom, reaches perhaps no definite end. The radiations oscillating too slowly to affect the eye as light may pass by insensible gradations into the long Hertzian waves of electricity.[666]

Professor Rowland's photographic map of the solar spectrum, published in 1886, and in a second enlarged edition in 1889, opened fresh possibilities for its study, from far down in the red to high up in the ultra-violet, and the accompanying scale of absolute wave-lengths[667] has been, with trifling modifications, universally adopted. His new table of standard solar lines was published in 1893.[668] Through his work, indeed, knowledge of the solar spectrum so far outstripped knowledge of terrestrial spectra, that the recognition of their common constituents was hampered by intolerable uncertainties. Thousands of the solar lines charted with minute precision remained unidentified for want of a corresponding precision in the registration of metallic lines. Rowland himself, however, undertook to provide a remedy. Aided by Lewis E. Jewell, he redetermined, at the Johns Hopkins University, the wave-lengths of about 16,000 solar lines,[669] photographing for comparison with them the spectra of all the known chemical elements except gallium, of which he could procure no specimen. The labour of collation was well advanced when he died at the age of fifty-two, April 16, 1901. Investigations of metallic arc-spectra have also been carried out with signal success by Hasselberg,[670] Kayser and Runge, O. Lohse,[671] and others.

Another condition sine qua non of progress in this department is the separation of true solar lines from those produced by absorption in our own atmosphere. And here little remains to be done. Thollon's great Atlas[672] was designed for this purpose of discrimination. Each of its thirty-three maps exhibits in quadruplicate a subdivision of the solar spectrum under varied conditions of weather and zenith-distance. Telluric effects are thus made easily legible, and they account wholly for 866, partly for 246, out of a total of 3,200 lines. But the death of the artist, April 8, 1887, unfortunately interrupted the half-finished task of the last seven years of his life. A most satisfactory record, meanwhile, of selective atmospheric action has been supplied by the experiments and determinations of Janssen, Cornu and Egoroff, by Dr. Becker's drawings,[673] and Mr. McClean's photographs of the analysed light of the sun at high, low, and medium altitudes; and the autographic pictures obtained by Mr. George Higgs, of Liverpool, of certain rhythmical groups in the red, emerging with surprising strength near sunset, excite general and well-deserved admiration.[674] The main interest, however, of all these documents resides in the information afforded by them regarding the chemistry of the sun.

The discovery that hydrogen exists in the atmosphere of the sun was made by Angstrom in 1862. His list of solar elements published in that year,[675] the result of an investigation separate from, though conducted on the same principle as Kirchhoff's, included the substance which we now know to be predominant among them. Dr. Pluecker of Bonn had identified in 1859 the Fraunhofer line F with the green ray of hydrogen, but drew no inference from his observation. The agreement was verified by Angstrom; two further coincidences were established; and in 1866 a fourth hydrogen line in the extreme violet (named h) was detected in the solar spectrum. With Thalen, he besides added manganese, titanium, and cobalt to the constituents of the sun enumerated by Kirchhoff, and raised the number of identical rays in the solar and terrestrial spectra of iron to no less than 460.[676]

Thus, when Sir Norman Lockyer entered on that branch of inquiry in 1872, fourteen substances were recognised as common to the earth and sun. Early in 1878 he was able to increase the list provisionally to thirty-three,[677] all except hydrogen metals. This rapid success was due to his adoption of the test of length in lieu of that of strength in the comparison of lines. He measured their relative significance, in other words, rather by their persistence through a wide range of temperature, than by their brilliancy at any one temperature. The distinction was easily drawn. Photographs of the electric arc, in which any given metal had been volatilised, showed some of the rays emitted by it stretching across the axis of the light to a considerable distance on either side, while many others clung more or less closely to its central hottest core. The former "long lines," regarded as certainly representative, were those primarily sought in the solar spectrum; while the attendant "short lines," often, in point of fact, due to foreign admixtures, were set aside as likely to be misleading.[678] The criterion is a valuable one, and its employment has greatly helped to quicken the progress of solar chemistry.

Carbon was the first non-metallic element discovered in the sun. Messrs. Trowbridge and Hutchins of Harvard College concluded in 1887,[679] on the ground of certain spectral coincidences, that this protean substance is vaporised in the solar atmosphere at a temperature approximately that of the voltaic arc. Partial evidence to the same effect had earlier been alleged by Lockyer, as well as by Liveing and Dewar; and the case was rendered tolerably complete by photographs taken by Kayser and Runge in 1889.[680] It was by Professor Rowland shown to be irresistible. Two hundred carbon-lines were, through his comparisons, sifted out from sunlight, and it contains others significant of the presence of silicon--a related substance, and one as important to rock-building on the earth, as carbon is to the maintenance of life. The general result of Rowland's labours was the establishment among solar materials, not only of these two out of the fourteen metalloids, or non-metallic substances, but of thirty-three metals, including silver and tin. Gold, mercury, bismuth, antimony, and arsenic were discarded from the catalogue; platinum and uranium, with six other metals, remained doubtful; while iron was recorded as crowding the spectrum with over two thousand obscure rays.[681] Gallium-absorption was detected in it by Hartley and Ramage in 1889.[682]

Dr. Henry Draper[683] announced, in 1877, his imagined discovery, in the solar spectrum, of eighteen especially brilliant spaces corresponding to oxygen-emissions. But the agreement proved, when put to the test of very high dispersion, to be wholly illusory.[684] Nor has it yet been found possible to identify, in analysed sunlight, any significant bright beams.[685]

The book of solar chemistry must be read in characters exclusively of absorption. Nevertheless, the whole truth is unlikely to be written there. That a substance displays none of its distinctive beams in the spectrum of the sun or of a star, affords scarcely a presumption against its presence. For it may be situated below the level where absorption occurs, or under a pressure such as to efface lines by widening and weakening them; it may be at a temperature so high that it gives out more light than it takes up, and yet its incandescence may be masked by the absorption of other bodies; finally, it may just balance absorption by emission, with the result of complete spectral neutrality. An instructive example is that of the chromospheric element helium. Father Secchi remarked in 1868[686] that there is no dark line in the solar spectrum matching its light; and his observation has been fully confirmed.[687] Helium-absorption is, however, occasionally noticed in the penumbrae of spots.[688]

Our terrestrial vital element might then easily subsist unrecognisably in the sun. The inner organisation of the oxygen molecule is a considerably plastic one. It is readily modified by heat, and these modifications are reflected in its varying modes of radiating light. Dr. Schuster enumerated in 1879[689] four distinct oxygen spectra, corresponding to various stages of temperature, or phases of electrical excitement; and a fifth has been added by M. Egoroff's discovery in 1883[690] that certain well-known groups of dark lines in the red end of the solar spectrum (Fraunhofer's A and B) are due to absorption by the cool oxygen of our air. These persist down to the lowest temperatures, and even survive a change of state. They are produced essentially the same by liquid, as by aerial oxygen.[691]

It seemed, however, possible to M. Janssen that these bands owned a joint solar and terrestrial origin. Oxygen in a fit condition to produce them might, he considered, exist in the outer atmosphere of the sun; and he resolved to decide the point. No one could bring more skill and experience to bear upon it than he.[692] By observations on the summit of the Faulhorn, as well as by direct experiment, he demonstrated, nearly thirty years ago, the leading part played by water-vapour in generating the atmospheric spectrum; and he had recourse to similar means for appraising the share in it assignable to oxygen. An electric beam, transmitted from the Eiffel Tower to Meudon in the summer of 1888, having passed through a weight of oxygen about equal to that piled above the surface of the earth, showed the groups A and B just as they appear in the high-sun spectrum.[693] Atmospheric action is then adequate to produce them. But M. Janssen desired to prove, in addition, that they diminish proportionately to its amount. His ascent of Mont Blanc[694] in 1890 was undertaken with this object. It was perfectly successful. In the solar spectrum, examined from that eminence, oxygen-absorption was so much enfeebled as to leave no possible doubt of its purely telluric origin. Under another form, nevertheless, it has been detected as indubitably solar. A triplet of dark lines low down in the red, photographed from the sun by Higgs and McClean, was clearly identified by Runge and Paschen in 1896[695] with the fundamental group of an oxygen series, first seen by Piazzi Smyth in the spectrum of a vacuum-tube in 1883.[696] The pabulum vitae of our earth is then to some slight extent effective in arresting transmitted sunlight, and oxygen must be classed as a solar element.

The rays of the sun, besides being stopped selectively in our atmosphere, suffer also a marked general absorption. This tells chiefly upon the shortest wave-lengths; the ultra-violet spectrum is in fact closed, as if by the interposition of an opaque screen. Nor does the screen appear very sensibly less opaque from an elevation of 10,000 feet. Dr. Simony's spectral photographs, taken on the Peak of Teneriffe,[697] extended but slightly further up than M. Cornu's, taken in the valley of the Loire. Could the veil be withdrawn, some indications as to the originating temperature of the solar spectrum might be gathered from its range, since the proportion of quick vibrations given out by a glowing body grows with the intensity of its incandescence. And this brings us to the subject of our next Chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 596: Phil. Mag., vol. xlii., p. 380, 1871.]

[Footnote 597: Astr. Nach., No. 3,053, Amer. Jour., vol. xlii., p. 162; Deslandres, Comptes Rendus, t. cxiii., p. 307.]

[Footnote 598: Proc. Roy. Society, vol. lxi., p. 433.]

[Footnote 599: Phil. Mag., vol. xlii., p. 377.]

[Footnote 600: Frost-Scheiner, Astr. Spectroscopy, pp. 184, 423.]

[Footnote 601: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xvii., p. 302.]

[Footnote 602: Astr. Nach., No. 1,769.]

[Footnote 603: Am. Jour. of Science, vol. xv., p. 85.]

[Footnote 604: Journ. Franklin Institute, vol. xl., p. 232_a_.]

[Footnote 605: Pogg. Annalen, Bd. cxlvi., p. 475; Astr. Nach., No. 3,014.]

[Footnote 606: Astr. Nach., Nos. 3,006, 3,037.]

[Footnote 607: This device was suggested by Janssen in 1869.]

[Footnote 608: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., pp. 70, 407.]

[Footnote 609: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., p. 604.]

[Footnote 610: Comptes Rendus, t. cxiii., p. 307.]

[Footnote 611: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., p. 50.]

[Footnote 612: Ibid., pp. 60, 314.]

[Footnote 613: Wiedemann's Annalen der Physik, Bd. xxv., p. 80.]

[Footnote 614: Evershed, Knowledge, vol. xxi., p. 133.]

[Footnote 615: Secchi, Le Soleil, t. ii., p. 294.]

[Footnote 616: Lockyer, Chemistry of the Sun, p. 418.]

[Footnote 617: L'Astronomie, August, 1884, p. 292 (Ricco); see also Evershed, Jour. British Astr. Ass., vol. ii., p. 174.]

[Footnote 618: Averaging about 100 miles across and 300 high. _Le Soleil_, t. ii., p. 35.]

[Footnote 619: The Sun, p. 192.]

[Footnote 620: Astr. Nach., No. 1,854.]

[Footnote 621: Mem. degli Spettroscopisti Italiani, t. v., p. 4; Secchi, ibid., t. vi., p. 56.]

[Footnote 622: Its non-atmospheric character was early defined by Proctor, Month. Not., vol. xxxi., p. 196.]

[Footnote 623: Astroph. Jour., vol. vi., p. 412.]

[Footnote 624: Ibid., vol. xi., p. 165.]

[Footnote 625: Ibid., p. 243.]

[Footnote 626: Sun's Place in Nature, pp. 111, 288.]

[Footnote 627: Abh. d. Koen. Boehm Ges. d. Wiss., Bd. ii., 1841-42, p. 467.]

[Footnote 628: In a paper read before the Societe Philomathique de Paris, December 23, 1848, and first published in extenso in _Ann. de Chim. et de Phys._, t. xix., p. 211 (1870). Hippolyte Fizeau died in September, 1896.]

[Footnote 629: Astr. Nach., No. 1,772.]

[Footnote 630: Ibid., No. 1,864.]

[Footnote 631: A. Cornu, Sur la Methode Doppler-Fizeau, p. D. 23.]

[Footnote 632: Am. Jour. of Sc., vol. xii., p. 321.]

[Footnote 633: Ibid., vol. xiv., p. 140.]

[Footnote 634: Bull. Astronom., February, 1884, p. 77.]

[Footnote 635: Comptes Rendus, t. xci., p. 368.]

[Footnote 636: Month. Not., vol. xliv., p. 170.]

[Footnote 637: See ante, p. 147.]

[Footnote 638: Recherches sur la Rotation du Soleil, Upsal, 1891.]

[Footnote 639: Harzer, Astr. Nach., No. 3,026; Stratonoff, Ibid., No. 3,344.]

[Footnote 640: Publ. Astr. Pacific Soc., vol. ii., p. 193.]

[Footnote 641: Proc. Roy. Society, vols. xvii., p. 415; xviii., p. 120.]

[Footnote 642: Comptes Rendus, t. cxii., p. 1421; t. cxiii., p. 310.]

[Footnote 643: At the sun's distance, one second of arc represents about 450 miles.]

[Footnote 644: Amer. Jour. of Sc., vol. ii., p. 468, 1871.]

[Footnote 645: Month. Not., vol. xxxii., p. 51.]

[Footnote 646: Nature, vol. xxiii., p. 281.]

[Footnote 647: Comptes Rendus, t. lxxxvii., p. 532.]

[Footnote 648: Ibid., t. xcvi., p. 359.]

[Footnote 649: A. Brester, Theorie du Soleil, p. 66.]

[Footnote 650: Such prominences as have been seen to grow by the spread of incandescence are of the quiescent kind, and present no deceptive appearance of violent motion.]

[Footnote 651: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xxviii., p. 157.]

[Footnote 652: "Evolution and the Spectroscope," Pop. Science Monthly, January, 1873.]

[Footnote 653: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xxiv., p. 353. These are the H and K of prominences. H. W. Vogel discovered in 1879 a hydrogen-line nearly coincident with H (Monatsb. Preuss. Ak., February, 1879, p. 118).]

[Footnote 654: Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xxviii., p. 444.]

[Footnote 655: Many of these were referred by Lockyer himself, who first sifted the matter, to traces of the metals concerned.]

[Footnote 656: Chemistry of the Sun, p. 312; Proc. Roy. Society, vol. lvii., p. 199.]

[Footnote 657: Lockyer's Chemistry of the Sun, p. 324.]

[Footnote 658: Month. Not., vol. li., p. 76.]

[Footnote 659: Ibid., vol. lviii., p. 370.]

[Footnote 660: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., p. 615.]

[Footnote 661: Thollon's estimate (Comptes Rendus, t. xcvii., p. 902) of 300,000 kilometres, seems considerably too low. Limiting the "average prominence region" to a shell 54,000 miles deep (2' of arc as seen from the earth), the visual line will, at mid-height (27,000 miles from the sun's surface), travel through (in round numbers) 320,000 miles of that region.]

[Footnote 662: Liveing and Dewar, Phil. Mag., vol. xvi. (5th ser.), p. 407.]

[Footnote 663: Chemistry of the Sun, p. 260.]

[Footnote 664: Nature, October 14, 1886.]

[Footnote 665: The normal spectrum is that depending exclusively upon wave-length--the fundamental constant given by nature as regards light. It is obtained by the interference of rays, in the manner first exemplified by Fraunhofer, and affords the only unvarying standard for measurement. In the refraction spectrum (upon which Kirchhoff's map was founded), the relative positions of the lines vary with the material of the prisms.]

[Footnote 666: Scheiner, Die Spectralanalyse der Gestirne, p. 168.]

[Footnote 667: Phil. Mag., vol. xxvii., p. 479.]

[Footnote 668: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xii., p. 321; Frost-Scheiner, Astr. Spectr., p. 363.]

[Footnote 669: Published in Astroph. Jour., vols. i. to vi.]

[Footnote 670: Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., p. 793.]

[Footnote 671: Astroph. Jour., vol. vi., p. 95.]

[Footnote 672: Annales de l'Observatoire de Nice, t. iii., 1890.]

[Footnote 673: Trans. Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. xxxvi., p. 99.]

[Footnote 674: Rev. A. L. Cortie, Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., p. 401. Specimens of his photographs were given by Ranyard in Knowledge, vol. xiii., p. 212.]

[Footnote 675: Ann. d. Phys., Bd. cxvii., p. 296.]

[Footnote 676: Comptes Rendus, t. lxiii., p. 647.]

[Footnote 677: Ibid., t. lxxxvi., p. 317. Some half dozen of these identifications have proved fallacious.]

[Footnote 678: Chemistry of the Sun, p. 143.]

[Footnote 679: Amer. Jour. of Science, vol. xxxiv., p. 348.]

[Footnote 680: Berlin Abhandlungen, 1889.]

[Footnote 681: Amer. Jour. of Science, vol. xli., p. 243. See Appendix, Table II.]

[Footnote 682: Astrophy. Jour., vol. ix., p. 219; Fowler, Knowledge, vol. xxiii., p. 11.]

[Footnote 683: Amer. Jour, of Science, vol. xiv., p. 89; Nature, vol. xvi., p. 364; Month. Not., vol. xxxix., p. 440.]

[Footnote 684: Month. Not., vol. xxxviii., p. 473; Trowbridge and Hutchins, Amer. Jour. of Science, vol. xxxiv., p. 263.]

[Footnote 685: Scheiner, Die Spectralanalyse, p. 180.]

[Footnote 686: Comptes Rendus, t. lxvii., p. 1123.]

[Footnote 687: Rev. A. L. Cortie, Month. Not., vol. li., p. 18.]

[Footnote 688: Young, The Sun, p. 135; Hale, Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., p. 312 Buss, Jour. Brit. Astr. Ass., vol. ix., p. 253.]

[Footnote 689: Phil. Trans., vol. clxx., p. 46.]

[Footnote 690: Comptes Rendus, t. xcvii., p. 555; t. ci., p. 1145.]

[Footnote 691: Liveing and Dewar, Astr. and Astrophysics, vol. xi., p. 705.]

[Footnote 692: Comptes Rendus, t. lx., p. 213; t. lxiii., p. 289.]

[Footnote 693: Ibid., t. cviii., p. 1035.]

[Footnote 694: Ibid., t. cxi., p. 431.]

[Footnote 695: Astroph. Jour., vols. iv., p. 317; vi., p. 426.]

[Footnote 696: Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin., vol. xxxii., p. 452.]

[Footnote 697: Comptes Rendus, t. cxi., p. 941; Huggins, Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xlvi., p. 168.]