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Speculations as to the cause of sun-spots have never ceased from Galileo's time to ours. He supposed them to be clouds. Scheiner said they were the indications of tumultuous movements occasionally agitating the ocean of liquid fire of which he supposed the sun to be composed.
My father possessed a very excellent achromatic spy-glass of 2 inches diameter. The object-glass was made by the celebrated Ramsden. When I was about fifteen I used it to gaze at the moon, planets, and sun-spots.
Even in his kindliest corner, on such occasions, the expression of his scornful back was as a whole volume of wingéd words! But the rare little cat tantrums of the Shah de Perse if to his so gentle excesses may be applied so strong a term were but as sun-spots on the effulgence of his otherwise constant amiability.
None of these compounds, stable at the high temperatures of sun-spots, has been much studied in the laboratory. The regions in which they exist, though cooler than the general atmosphere of the sun, are at temperatures of several thousand degrees, attained in our laboratories only with the aid of such devices as powerful electric furnaces.
Finally, to mention only one more case, it was the Michelson-Morley experiment, made years ago with still another form of interferometer, that yielded the basic idea from which the theory of relativity was developed by Lorentz and Einstein. Made with the spectroheliograph, showing the immense vortices, or whirling storms like tornadoes, that centre in sun-spots.
Auroras, magnetic storms, and such electric currents as those that recently deranged several Atlantic cables are due, not to the magnetism of the sun or its spots, but probably to streams of electrons, shot out from highly disturbed areas of the solar surface surrounding great sun-spots, traversing ninety-three million miles of the ether of space, and penetrating deep into the earth's atmosphere.
In connection with them two highly significant circumstances were pointed out. First, that of the approximate coincidence between their positions and those of sun-spots previously observed. Next, that "the moon passed over them, leaving them behind, and revealing successive portions as she advanced."
Such observations as these, however interesting, cannot be claimed as discoveries of the sun-spots. One of these claimants was a Jesuit named Scheiner, and the jealousy of this man is said to have had a share in bringing about that persecution to which we must now refer.
So far, then, he would not be surprised on hearing the announcement of Professor Lockyer's recent paper before the Royal Society on the connection between sun-spots and the rainfall in India.
And one old gentleman had heard that before, but did not understand it exactly, so I explained it to him; and then I talked about changes of climate in general, and the formation of beds of coal, and the ice period, and sun-spots, and the theory of comets, and about my husband getting up to see the last one, and going out in a felt hat and dressing-gown with a bed-candle to look for it and about that dream of mine, did I tell you?
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