532 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



is an animal, nothing more, nothing less ; hence all the animal forces 

 act in him. 



But is it by his body that man has acquired that empire that we 

 have seen he possesses ? You know very well it is not ; you know 

 very well that, if he reigns over all around him, over inanimate Nature 

 as over organized Nature, he owes it to his intelligence, of like nature, 

 but immensely superior to that of animals. 



Finally, man has his own attributes — faculties that belong exclu- 

 sively to him — morality and religion. Well, these exclusively human 

 faculties seem admirably to complete this exceptional being. It is 

 these that ennoble him, and justify the incontestable empire* that he 

 claims over the globe ; for it is these which, along with the sentiment 

 of punishment, give birth to the idea of duty, the thought of respon- 

 sibility. 



Here, gentlemen, is the summing up that one is led to make of man 

 when he is studied exclusivel}^ from knowledge by the naturalist. I 

 hope you will find that you have lost nothing. 



THE PHOTOSPHEEE AND SUN-SPOTS. 



By Pkof. S. p. LANGLEY, 

 director of the alleghany observatory. \ 



WHY is it that almost any one who was offered the opportunity 

 of witnessing an eruption of Etna, or the effects of a tropica) 

 cyclone, would embrace such an occasion with eagerness, while phe- 

 nomena' so similar in kind, and on so far grander a scale, visible daily 

 on the surface of the sun, excite a comparatively feeble interest in all 

 but those devoted to their study ? 



It is doubtless, in part, because we have a more intimate and awe- 

 inspired interest in disturbances which happen so near us, and which 

 we do not extend to others with which we conceive we have less per- 

 sonal concern ; but the difference of the kind, as well as the degree of 

 our interest in solar phenomena, from that which we take in those 

 which occur, as it were, at home, is due in part perhaps to a remoter 

 cause, and forms a portion of the unconscious bias which the modern 

 mind has inherited from ancient modes of thought. 



Deeply impressed by the fact that the sun had warmed and lighted 

 the world from unknown time, with a fire which never seemed to be 

 fed, yet which never burned low like a terrestrial flame, ancient phi- 

 losophy concluded that the sun was formed of something quite other 

 than any gross earthly elements — of an element of pure fire, which 

 shone and warmed forever without fuel, because it was its " nature" 

 to; just as it is the "nature" of a fire on the hearth to burn only 



