Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/68

58 from terrestrial experiments, to determine solar temperatures: such a proceeding is an unsound and unwarrantable extrapolation, likely to lead to widely erroneous conclusions.

For my own part, I feel satisfied as to the substantial correctness of the generally received theory of the sun's constitution, which regards this body as a great ball of intensely heated vapors and gases, clothed outwardly with a coat of dazzling clouds formed by the condensation of the less volatile substances into drops and crystals like rain and snow. Yet it must be acknowledged that this hypothesis is called in question by high authorities, who maintain, with Kirchhoff and Zöllner, that the visible photosphere is no mere layer of clouds, but either a solid crust, or a liquid ocean of molten metals; and there may be some who continue to hold the view of the elder Herschel (still quoted as authoritative in numerous school-books), that the central core of the sun is a solid and even habitable globe, having the outer surface of its atmosphere covered with a sheet of flame maintained by some action of the matter diffused in the space through which the system is rushing. We must admit that the question of the sun's constitution is not yet beyond debate. And not only the constitution of the sun itself, but the nature and condition of the matter composing it, is open to question. Have we to do with iron and sodium and hydrogen as we know them on the earth, or are the solar substances in some different and more elemental state?

However confident many of us may be as to the general theory of the constitution of the sun, very few, I imagine, would maintain that the full explanation of sun-spots and their behavior has yet been reached. We meet continually with phenomena which, if not really contradictory to prevalent ideas, at least do not find in them an easy explanation. So far as mere visual appearances are concerned, I think it must be conceded that the most natural conception is that of a dark chip or scale thrown up from beneath, like scum in a caldron, and floating, partly submerged, in the blazing flames of the photosphere which overhang its edges, and bridge across it, and cover it with filmy veils, until at last it settles down again and disappears. It hardly looks like a mere hollow filled with cooler vapor, nor is its appearance that of a cyclone seen from above. But then, on the other hand, its spectrum under high dispersion is very peculiar; not at all that of a solid, heated slag, but it is made up of countless fine dark lines, packed almost in contact, showing, however, here and there, a bright line, or at least an interspace where the rank is broken by an interval wider than that which elsewhere separates the elementary lines—a spectrum which, so far as I know, has not yet found an analogue in any laboratory experiment. It seems, however, to belong to the type of absorption spectra, and to indicate, as the accepted theory requires, that the spot is dark in consequence of loss of light, and not from any original defect of luminosity. Here, certainly, are problems that require solution.