6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. q2 



that both the filaments and the granules I have so minutely described, 

 may hereafter be resolved into smaller components still, but their per- 

 sistent individuality as a whole under such disturbance, impresses me 

 as a most striking feature, and one for which, under similar circum- 

 stances, we have no exact analogy in our own meteorology. 



"Are these round, nearly central openings, so that looking into one 

 we are looking into the axis of the cyclone to which the spot is due — 

 into the vortex of the great whirl down which the chromospheric 

 vapors are being sucked by mechanical action ? Are they ragged aper- 

 tures — the craters as it were of eruptions whence metallic vapors are 

 being forced w/'f The answer to this question, were there but these 

 two alternatives, would be definitive as to our choice between the prin- 

 cipal theories of solar circulation." 



Dr. George E. Hale has told me that the better he perceives by 

 photography or vision with the great outfits at Pasadena and Mount 

 Wilson the features of sun spots and the photosphere, the more do 

 they approach Langley's drawings and descriptions of them. It is 

 interesting to add that photography has plainly shown that high-lying 

 solar clouds of matter are indeed sucked into the umbrae of sun spots 

 just as Langley suggested. 



"THE TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE OF JULY 29; 1878: 

 OBSERVATIONS AT PIKE'S PEAK, COLORADO" 



" Upon the 22d Prof. John W. Langley arrived, and, as the rain 

 poured freely through the roof upon the boxes which lay in the wet, 

 as the best means of protecting the telescope, we mounted it in the 

 open air on a partly level spot of a few feet square some yards from 

 the hut. Procuring some lard from the kitchen, I covered every part 

 of the steel-work with it. and wrapped the instrument in a piece of 

 canvas. Upon the 23d Prof. Cleveland Abbe, of the Signal Service, 

 arrived, and on the same evening two tents were pitched, which had 

 been sent by the order of General Myer. There was no piece of level 

 ground or rock large enough to lie upon ; but we procured some logs 

 which had been brought up for fire-wood, and, laying these between 

 the bowlders, spread on them a sack of hay for each, and blankets 

 which had been brought up in the rain ; these were all damp, and our 

 first night under canvas in a cold and high wind was not agreeable, 

 particularly as the difficulty of breathing decidedly increased rather 

 than diminished. In the morning all of the party were ill. The day 

 was passed in fruitless attempts to adjust the equatorial. In the morn- 



