Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/12

2 of precision, had learned no other, and remained indifferent to a great question to which the old methods did not apply. We are called into existence by a great central fire, the sun, by which we continue to exist from one hour to another. What is it? what is this heat which it pours into space, and with whose cessation we shall cease? How long will it continue to feed our lives? A few years ago, with almost the sole exceptions of the Herschels and Pouillet, no one even asked these questions, much less intelligently sought their solution.

It is hard to say to whom the awakening of attention is due; yet if any one were to be named, it should perhaps be the Italian physicist Melloni, "the Newton of heat."

His book, "La Thermochrose," has to me an attraction of its own, for the author, with the ingenuous confidence of his nation, begins, not by describing his thermopile or galvanometer, but by taking the reader into his personal experience, and telling him how even as a child he felt an invincible curiosity about what we have just seen hardly any one else then cared for, and how, rising long before dawn, he loved to seek some quiet spot, to wait there in the silence of the sleeping world the first beams of the sun, and as he felt their warmth and heard the stir of life they awakened round him, how he too was stirred with wonder and interest as to the nature of that mysterious thing, radiant heat, and resolved to give his future to its study. If to distinguish a cause for wonder and inquiry in what to the common mind has called for neither be a characteristic of genius, then Melloni must be allowed its possession, and in his but too short years he showed the world how much interest and importance lay in this then neglected study, which so many with clearer knowledge and better methods follow to-day.

Fraunhofer's previous work had prepared the way for the spectroscope, and with the now awakened interest in these questions, its employment by Kirchhoff in 1860 may be said to inaugurate the present study of solar physics, as distinguished from the classic astronomy, which concerned itself with number and measure first, and in a wholly secondary degree with the physical characteristics of the heavenly bodies. This study occupies itself with the former, indeed, but chiefly in aid of other investigations, and by the study of solar physics then, we mean much more than a telescopic examination of the sun; we mean besides this the analysis of its radiations by the spectroscope, their summation by the photometer and thermopile, the determinations of its heat and the possible effects of changes in it on terrestrial meteorology, and generally the pursuit of all those problems which unite the methods of physics and astronomy.

In 1860 we already knew that the sun was surrounded by an envelope then visible only during total eclipses, and which was surmised to be gaseous; and of the sun itself we knew very little more than that it was a hot globe with spots upon it; for, though Schwabe had