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"Is it fox-red, and the man a small man pocked with sun-spots, and very quick in his movements?" "It is the man himself." Chandos shook his clenched hand with annoyance, and then set off swiftly down the street. "It is Peter the Red Ferret once more!" said he. "I knew him of old in France, where he has done us more harm than a company of men-at-arms.
The discovery of sun-spots in 1610 by Fabricius and Galileo first opened a way for inquiry into the solar constitution; but it was long before that way was followed with system or profit. The seeming irregularity of the phenomena discouraged continuous attention; casual observations were made the basis of arbitrary conjectures, and real knowledge received little or no increase.
The "chromosphere" was, for the most part, shallow and quiescent; its depth, above the spot zones, had sunk from about 6,000 to 2,000 miles; prominences were few and faint. Obviously, if a type of corona corresponding to a minimum of sun-spots existed, it should be seen then or never. It was seen; but while, in some respects, it agreed with anticipation, in others it completely set it at naught.
The changes visible in the solar surface were then generally regarded as no less capricious than the changes in the skies of our temperate regions. Consequently, the reckoning and registering of sun-spots was a task hardly more inviting to an astronomer than the reckoning and registering of summer clouds.
At least he has used all which have not, like Weber's, been proved to be only transient sun-spots. Selecting those which fit in well with Lescarbault's observation, he has pointed out how remarkable it is that they show this accord.
The fact that the frequency of magnetic storms goes through a period of about eleven years, and is proportional to the frequency of sun-spots, has been well established. The recent work of Professor Bigelow shows the coincidence to be of remarkable exactness, the curves of the two phenomena being practically coincident so far as their general features are concerned.
I'm calling his attention to the now prevailing sun-spots, as bearing on Lattimore property." Mr. Elkins read the letter carefully, turned it over, and read it again. "Don't," said he; "he may be one of those asses who fail to see the business value of the reductio ad absurdum.... Fellows, we must push this L. & G. W. business with Pendleton. Some of us ought to be down there now."
For in August, 1867, when similar equatorial emanations, accompanied by similar symptoms of polar excitement, were described and depicted by Grosch of the Santiago Observatory, sun-spots were at a minimum; while the corona of 1715, which appears from the record of it by Roger Cotes to have been of the same type, preceded by three years the ensuing maximum.
Each series of sun-spots is thus, to some extent, overlapped by the succeeding one; so that while the average interval from one maximum to the next is eleven years, the period of each distinct wave of agitation is twelve or fourteen. Curious evidence of the retarded character of the maximum of 1883-4 was to be found in the unusually low latitude of the spot-zones when it occurred.
The association of the corona with sun-spots is less evident than that of the eruptive prominences; still such an association exists, for the form and extent of the corona vary with the sun-spot period of which we shall presently speak. The constitution of the corona remains to be discovered.
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