Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/17

Rh shows us to how limited a company of specialists we must look as judges in matters so important.

The instrumental aids of our study have grown in the period under review with the demand for greater accuracy, until the detached prisms of Kirchhoff's apparatus are replaced by trains of automatically adjustable mechanism, giving us in Thollon's recent instrument the equivalent dispersion of thirty prisms of flint, or what has replaced the "gitter" of Fraunhofer, that wonderful product of skill, the Rutherfurd grating, which for a large variety of uses has already supplanted the prism. Observatories especially devoted to solar physics are being established by European governments, as at Potsdam by Prussia, and at Meudon by France. I have already alluded to that on Etna, and I hope it will not be long before we have a distinctly physical observatory within our own territory. There is no step in our power to take which promises so much for immediate advance as the installation of one in a suitably elevated station, for certain investigations can be made only under this condition, and no amount of instrumental appliance, patience, or skill, at a lower altitude, supplies their place.

In now reviewing the acquisitions which this twenty years' labor has brought us, we can not but agree that we have achieved a great deal, and yet must admit, with wonder at the field still before us, how little is our progress in comparison with what remains unknown.

We have found out how to detect daily the outbursts from the sun which were before invisible, but we watch these outpourings of enormous forms without yet knowing what drives them forth, without being sure how far our very view is not in part illusion.

We have learned how to study and fix many of the wonderful details of spot-actions without knowing what spots are. We see them presenting themselves in increasing importance through a term of years, and then diminishing, and we attempt to assign a period to these cycles of growth and decay. This period is often fixed at about eleven years, with a perhaps unjustifiable confidence, for we can not be said to know whether what we have seen in so brief a time is constant or variable, nor whether it be not the mere incident of some greater cycle, whose course began before man was here to see it, and whose term may not be complete till he has gone.

We are possibly now led to ask what our science has taught us on the connection of these remote changes with questions which affect our daily lives, and perhaps to put the utilitarian question, "What is all this worth?"

We find at the present time our study growing into a closer union, not merely with stellar astronomy on the one hand and terrestrial meteorology on the other, but with all the physical sciences, than would once have been supposed possible. Thus, to give a single instance, whatever be the result of the discussions aroused by Mr. Lockyer's statements, it seems likely that we are to look to the analysis of the