Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/362

348 have the observations of many gardeners in the British Isles, who assert that the tree "cannot resist severe frost, and consequently does not last many years." "I have frequently seen," writes one, "young-trees, ten, twenty, and even thirty feet high, in the Channel Islands, growing vigorously during a period of three, four, or more years in sheltered situations, but, on the appearance of severe frosts, killed to the ground." On the other hand, various correspondents of the Gardener's Chronicle write that, during the severe cold of last winter, the Eucalyptus was uninjured in the island of Anglesea, and in the west and south of Ireland.



HAT the Sun causes a saving of fire and candle was known to all antiquity from the day fire and candle were first invented; and that was nearly all they knew about him. Nothing more was known for ages. It was only yesterday that he set up the business of sketching portraits and no matter what. He did it so cheaply and so correctly as to rob poor miniature-painters of their bread; and then came another halt, though only a short one, in our knowledge of what the Sun can do. But now, the more we know about him, the more grounds do we find for surmising that he is a marvelous servant—perhaps master—of all work.

Among the cartes de visite with which the sun presents us, are now to be included his own, in various moods of temper and expression. Thanks to photography and spectral analysis, the solar phenomena are daily fixed on paper and submitted to the inspection of an inquiring public. They thus escape from the narrow and not very accessible domain of observatories, and enter the grand current of publicity. Both in America and in England, numerous specimens of astronomical photography are offered for sale. First as to merit stand the admirable photographs of the moon published by Mr. Lewis Rutherfurd; and those of the Sun's disk, which present the spots, the facules, and the brilliant marblings of his surface with as much clearness and as striking an effect as the very best telescope; and also those of the solar spectrum, whose stripes have been self-registered with a fidelity which leaves no room for cavil. The low price of the "Annuaire of the Bureau des Longitudes"—where M. Faye has published the essay from which this paper has derived its facts—does not allow it to give actual photographs; it is obliged to be content with carefully executed engravings from originals supplied by the Observatory of Wilna.

Cosmic meteorology, that is the meteorology of the universe 