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THE POPELAE SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



more enduring, than any that their " spirits " 

 could exert by playing tunes on accordions or 

 rapping out passages from their works. May I 

 not now say the same — though I hare the honor 

 to be her brother — of the noble-hearted woman 

 whose recent loss has been mourned, not alone 

 by her family and personal friends, but by a 

 world-embracing circle that ranges through all 

 grades of society, from the very highest to the 

 very lowest '? The life devoted by Mary Carpen- 

 ter to the rescue of the " dangerous and perish- 

 ing classes " from brutal ignorance and degrading 

 vice was "controlled" in the first instance by 

 the "spirit" of the Great Teacher of that faith in 

 the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of 

 man which " possessed " her whole nature ; next, 

 by that of the earthly father who had trained 

 her, alike by precept and example, to a life of 

 service to mankind ; and then by those of Joseph 

 Tuckerman — the Oberlin of Boston, Massachusetts 

 — and of Rammohun Roy, the great Hindoo re- 

 former. It was under these influences that she 

 did, in the second half of a life of seventy years, 

 a work for which the first half was the training; 

 and which, I venture to affirm, has not been sur- 

 passed in its power, its range, or its productive- 

 ness, by that of any other single philanthropist, 

 male or female. And when the history of that 

 life, the details of that work, shall have been 

 fully given to the world, I cannot doubt that the 



" spirit " of Mary Carpenter will animate the zeal 

 and direct the activity of those who follow in her 

 footsteps far more effectively than if her " mate- 

 rialized " image were to appear among the in- 

 mates of her reformatory, or her "raps" or her 

 "slate-writing" were to signify her instructions, 

 to the women of India. 



Those who, while living, have been " epistles 

 known and read of all men " — who have achieved 

 the truest greatness by laboring in the service of 

 others ("whosoever will be great among you, let 

 him be your minister") — leave behind them an 

 influence which, no less than that of the great in 

 intellectual power and in moral worth, diffuses 

 and deepens in each succeeding generation. I 

 feel sure that any one who has tried to shape his 

 (or her) life under the "spirit-control" of John 

 F. W. Herschel, of George Grote, or of Mary Car- 

 penter, would far rather that anything he may 

 have well done should help to transmit that in- 

 fluence to those who come after, than that, if 

 permitted to " revisit the glimpses of the moon," 

 he should-be placed at the disposal of the profes- 

 sional " mediums " who trade in " spiritual com- 

 munications," and should be made to pander to 

 the vulgar curiosity of those who will delight to 

 be assured that he is "pretty jolly up there," or 

 " very miserable down below," according to their 

 respective conceptions of his deserts. — Fraser's 

 Magazine. 



SUN-SPOTS AND FAMINES. 



By J. NORMAN LOCKYER and Pnop. W. W. HUNTER. 



THE Madras famine gives emphasis to a series 

 of researches made by isolated observers 

 during the last twenty years. The common re- 

 sult to which these researches point is a more 

 direct connection between solar activity and the 

 atmospheric conditions of the earth than was 

 previously suspected. This conclusion has been 

 arrived at independently of a priori considera- 

 tions. Indeed, one of the most remarkable feat- 

 ures of the gradual building up of the connec- 

 tion has been, the aversion on the part of each 

 investigator to draw general inferences from the 

 special result at which he had arrived. 



We think that the time has now come to ex- 

 amine the common direction to which these iso- 

 lated observations point, and to inquire how far 



the common result is in accord with the conclu- 

 sions which might have been anticipated a priori 

 from recent solar work. 



Exactly a century ago scientific men were dis- 

 cussing the startling announcements made by De 

 la Lande concerning the constitution of the sun. 

 Dr. Wilson, of Glasgow, had discovered, as he 

 thought, that the solar spots which for upward 

 of two centuries had proved a stumbling-block 

 for astronomers, were simply great, yawning 

 chasms in the outer atmosphere of that luminary. 

 De la Lande had fallen upon this conclusion with 

 his accustomed vigor, and declared that they 

 were nothing but the higher and more irreducible 

 parts — the mountains, in fact — of a solid sun ex- 

 posed from time to time by the ebb and flow of 



