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There are many such examples to be met with in the biographies of men who attained eminence in wholly different callings from those into which they were forced in their youth. Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, and who first conceived the generally-accepted theory as to the cause of sun-spots, was brought up by his father to be a musician.
It was dark in this interior space, the floor mottled with gleaming sun-spots. Across the wider opening, unroofed to the pale blue of the zenith, the first slow shade was stretching, a creeping gray coolness, encroaching on the burning ground. Here she threw herself down, looking out through the entrance at the desert shimmering through the heat haze.
The corona is undoubtedly affected both in shape and constitution by the periodic ebb and flow of solar activity, its low-tide form being winged, its high-tide form stellate; while the rays emitted by the gases contained in it fade, and the continuous spectrum brightens, at times of minimum sun-spots.
To the uncertainties of the weather, and the chances of cholera, war, and earthquake, we have added an artificial uncertainty worse than any of these we have invented a series of financial cyclones, which sweep round the globe, devastating all lands, and no more to be predicted despite theories of sun-spots, cyclones and financial crises than wrecks at sea; indeed, far less predictable, for I believe with the ex-mayor quoted by Bonamy Price, that finance is a subject which no man can understand in this world, or even in the next.
It was suspected a full century ago by Herschel that the variations in the number of sun-spots had a direct effect upon terrestrial weather, and he attempted to demonstrate it by using the price of wheat as a criterion of climatic conditions, meantime making careful observation of the sun-spots.
Reference was made, a few lines above, to the resemblance of the spectra of sun-spots to those of certain stars which seem to be failing through age. This in itself is extremely suggestive; but if this resemblance had never been discovered, we should have been justified in regarding the sun as variable in its output of energy; and not only variable, but probably increasingly so.
The explanation of this phenomena, if Professor Lockyer reads the signs aright, is that during times of minimum sun-spot activity the temperature of the sun-spots is relatively cool, and that in times of activity the temperature becomes greatly increased.
The astronomers have long tried to find out what makes the sun-spots, and some of them now think that they are caused by furious winds which make great rents in this bright garment; for they tell us that there are sun-storms far more terrible than any storm that ever raged on sea or land.
These movements seem to have definite relation to any sun-spots in the neighbourhood. From the results already obtained it seems certain that, if this method of observation be continued, it cannot fail to supply facts of the greatest importance. It is quite impossible to do justice here to the work of all those who are engaged on astronomical physics.
I shall solve the great mystery of the 'sun-spots' and the 'willow leaves. Only he will never know it. That's a bitter drop in the cup!" So saying, he applied his eye to the telescope, his ruling passion strong in death. For myself, as often as I had admired the glorious luminary, I could not think of it now without a shudder, and fell a prey to my own melancholy ruminations.
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