Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/667

Rh inferences; but I think it is safe at least to say that the sky is not self-luminous, and that, since it can only be shining blue at the expense of the sun, all the light this sky sends us has been taken by our atmosphere away from the direct solar beam, which would grow both brighter and bluer if this were restored to it.

If all that has been said so far renders it possible that the sun may be blue, you will still have a right to say that "possibilities" and "may-bes" are not evidence, and that no chain of mere hypotheses will draw Truth out of her well. We are all of one mind here, and I desire next to call your attention to what I think is evidence.

Remembering that the case of our supposed dweller in the cave who could not get outside, or that of the inhabitants of the ocean-floor who can not rise to the surface, is really like our own, over whose heads is a crystalline roof which no man from the beginning of time has ever got outside of, an upper sea to whose surface we have never risen—we recognize that if we could rise to the surface, leaving the medium whose effect is in dispute wholly beneath us, we should see the sun as it is, and get proof of an incontrovertible kind; and that, if we can not entirely do this, we shall get nearest to proof under our real circumstances by going as high as we can in a balloon, or by ascending a very high mountain. The balloon will not do, because we have to use heavy apparatus requiring a solid foundation. The proof to which I ask your kind attention, then, is that derived from the actual ascent of a remarkable mountain by an expedition undertaken for that purpose, which carried a whole physical laboratory up to a point where nearly one half the whole atmosphere lay below us. I wish to describe the difference we found in the sun's energy at the bottom of the mountain and at the top, and then the means we took to allow for the effect of that part of the earth's atmosphere still over our heads even here, so that we may be said to have virtually got outside it altogether.

Before we begin our ascent, let me explain more clearly what we are going to seek. We need not expect to find that the original sunlight is a pure monochromatic blue by any means, but that, though its rays contain red, orange, blue, and all the other spectral colors, the blue, the violet, and the allied tints were originally there in disproportionate amounts, so that, though all which make white were present from the first, the refrangible end of the spectrum had such an excess of color that the dominant effect was that of a bluish sun. In the same way, when I say briefly that our atmosphere has absorbed this excess of blue and let the white reach us, I mean, more strictly speaking, that this atmosphere has absorbed all the colors, but, selectively, taking out more orange than red, more green than orange, more blue than green; so that its action is wholly a taking out—an action like that which you now see going on with this sieve, sifting a mixture of blue and white beads, and holding back the blue while letting the white fall down.