ON THE SOLAR CORONA. 755 



exercise in observation ; and this is as far as the juvenile capacity can 

 go. It is neither fitting nor possible that tremendous ideas should 

 make a profound impression upon a child's mind. It has no capabil- 

 ity either to appreciate or to receive them. Savages are incapable of 

 wonder ; they do not know enough to wonder. Said Professor Grove, 

 in his address before the British Association at Nottingham, " If the 

 primitive inhabitants of Britain could emerge and behold the wonder- 

 ful triumphs of art and science in our civilization, it is doubtful if 

 they would know enough to be astonished." And so with children. 

 We may teach them to say of the stars, " How I wonder what you 

 are ! " but they do not wonder in the least. Only minds highly culti- 

 vated and widely informed are capable of appreciating the tremendous 

 idea of evolution so as to be deeply impressed by it. We are not 

 to suppose, because the young readily acquire terms and phrases, and 

 seem in a way to understand them, that they are therefore in posses- 

 sion of their real and full meanings. There are stages in the process 

 of assimilating ideas which the pupil reaches one after another in the 

 slow course of mental unfolding. Before the period of its formal edu- 

 cation, in the natural development of mind, the child never leaps for- 

 ward into the complex and difficult, but insensibly grows into greater 

 and greater strength through its spontaneous interest in simple things. 

 This is the safest course to follow, because we are here on the solid 

 ground of Nature's own method. 



ON" THE SOLAE COKONA.* 



By WILLIAM HUGGINS, F. E. S. 



IF it were usual to prefix a motto to these evening discourses, I might 

 have selected such words as " Seeing the Invisible," for I have to 

 describe a method of investigation by which what is usually unseeable 

 may become revealed. We live at the bottom of a deep ocean of air, 

 and therefore every object outside the earth can be seen by us only 

 as it looks when viewed through this great depth of air. Professor 

 Langley has shown recently that the air mars, colors, distorts, and 

 therefore misleads and cheats us to an extent much greater than was 

 supposed. Langley considers that the light and heat absorbed and 

 scattered by the air and the particles of matter floating in it amount 

 to no less than forty per cent of the light falling upon it. In conse- 

 quence of this want of transparency and of the presence of finely 

 divided matter always more or less suspended in it, the air, when the 

 sun shines upon it, becomes itself a source of light. This illuminated 



* A lecture delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Friday evening, Feb- 

 ruary 20, 1885. 



