FIG. 12.—THE CACTUS TYPE.
(FROM SECCHI’S “LE SOLEIL.”)
I think if we assign one year rather than another for the birth of the youthful science of solar physics, it should be 1861, when Kirchhoff and Bunsen published their memorable research on Spectrum Analysis, and when Nasmyth observed what he called the “willow-leaf” structure of the solar surface (see [Fig. 11]). Mr. Nasmyth, with a very powerful reflecting telescope, thought he had succeeded in finding what these faint mottlings really are composed of, and believed that he had discovered in them some most extraordinary things. This is what he thought he saw: The whole sun is, according to him, covered with huge bodies of most definite shape, that of the oblong willow leaf, and of enormous but uniform size; and the faint mottlings the reader has just noticed are, according to him, made up of these. “These,” he says, “cover the whole disk of the sun (except in the space occupied by the spots) in countless millions, and lie crossing each other in every imaginable direction.” Sir John Herschel took a particular interest in the supposed discovery, and, treating it as a matter of established fact, proceeded to make one of the most amazing suggestions in explanation that ever came from a scientific man of deserved eminence. We must remember how much there is unknown in the sun still, and what a great mystery even yet overhangs many of our relations to that body which maintains our own vital action, when we read the following words, which are Herschel’s own. Speaking of these supposed spindle-shaped monsters, he says:
“The exceedingly definite shape of these objects, their exact similarity to one another, and the way in which they lie across and athwart each other,—all these characters seem quite repugnant to the notion of their being of a vaporous, a cloudy, or a fluid nature. Nothing remains but to consider them as separate and independent sheets, flakes, or scales, having some sort of solidity. And these ... are evidently the immediate sources of the solar light and heat, by whatever mechanism or whatever processes they may be enabled to develop, and as it were elaborate, these elements from the bosom of the non-luminous fluid in which they appear to float. Looked at in this point of view, we cannot refuse to regard them as organisms of some peculiar and amazing kind; and though it would be too daring to speak of such organization as partaking of the nature of life, yet we do know that vital action is competent to develop at once heat and light and electricity.”
FIG. 13.—EQUATORIAL TELESCOPE AND PROJECTION.
Such are his words; and when we consider that each of these solar inhabitants was supposed to extend about two hundred by one thousand miles upon the surface of the fiery ocean, we may subscribe to Mr. Proctor’s comment, that “Milton’s picture of him who on the fires of hell ‘lay floating many a rood,’ seems tame and commonplace compared with Herschel’s conception of these floating monsters, the least covering a greater space than the British Islands.”
FIG. 14.—POLARIZING EYE-PIECE.
I hope I may not appear wanting in respect for Sir John Herschel—a man whose memory I reverence—in thus citing views which, if his honored life could have been prolonged, he would have abandoned. I do so because nothing else can so forcibly illustrate the field for wonder and wild conjecture solar physics presented even a few years ago; and its supposed connection with that “Vital Force,” which was till so lately accepted by physiology, serves as a kind of landmark on the way we have come.
This new science of ours, then, youthful as it is, has already had its age of fable.