Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/413

 Sometimes they appear to lie upon the limb of the sun like a bank of clouds in the horizon; probably because they are so far from the edge of the disk that only their upper portions are in sight. When seen in their full extent they are ordinarily connected to the underlying chromosphere by slender columns, which are usually smallest at the base, and appear often to be made up of separate filaments closely intertwined, and expanding upward. Sometimes the whole under surface is fringed with down-hanging filaments, which remind one of a summer shower falling from a heavy thunder-cloud. Sometimes they float entirely free from the chromosphere; indeed, as a general rule, the layer clouds are attended by detached cloudlets for the most part horizontal in their arrangement.

The figures give an idea of some of the general appearances of this class of prominences, but their delicate, filmy beauty can be adequately rendered only by a far more elaborate style of engraving.

Their spectrum is usually very simple, consisting of the four lines of hydrogen and the orange D3—hence the appellation hydrogenous. Occasionally the sodium and magnesium lines also appear, and that even near the summit of the clouds; and this phenomenon was so much more frequently observed in the clear atmosphere of Sherman as to suggest that, if the power of our spectroscopes were sufficiently increased, it would cease to be unusual.

The genesis of this sort of prominence is problematical. They have been commonly looked upon as the débris and relics of eruptions, consisting of gases which have been ejected from beneath the solar surface, and then abandoned to the action of the currents of the sun's upper atmosphere. But near the poles of the sun distinctively eruptive prominences never appear, and there is no evidence of aërial currents which would transport to those regions matters ejected nearer the sun's equator. Indeed, the whole appearance of these objects indicates that they originate where we see them. Possibly, although in the polar regions there are no violent eruptions, there yet may be a quiet outpouring of heated hydrogen sufficient to account for their production—an outrush issuing through the smaller pores of the solar surface, which abound near the poles as well as elsewhere.

But Secchi reports an observation (not yet, however, confirmed by other spectroscopists, so far as we know) which, if correct, puts a very different face upon the matter. He has seen isolated cloudlets form and grow spontaneously without any perceptible connection with the chromosphere or other masses of hydrogen, just as in our own atmosphere clouds form from aqueous vapor, already present in the air, but invisible until some local cooling or change of pressure causes its condensation. Granting the correctness of the observation, these prominences are, therefore, formed by some local heating or other luminous excitement of hydrogen already present, and not by any transportation and aggregation of materials from a distance. The