( 594 ) 
of course that their absorbing action would only be shown by a 
single one among the many ‘floceuli which HALE saw floating above 
the spot studied by him. Yet we should have to believe in that 
impossibility, for among all the other floceuli above the spot Hare 
could not observe one, not even among the smallest and nearest to 
the spot, that showed the slightest advance towards the spot ’). 
In my opinion it is not at all certain even that this single dark 
floceulus, which Hate thought sufficient to prove the absorbing action 
of the Solar Vortices, actually disappeared in a spot. It is also 
quite possible that this floceulus, amidst other incessantly renewing 
and shifting floeculi, has been covered up by them in consequence 
of which it has become invisible. On very close and unprejudiced 
inspection, to be sure, we see that much of the quasi-absorbed 
flocculus is left on the clichés obtained after the supposed absorption. 
But even more clearly than by the hydrogen flocculi the non- 
existence of material vortices is proved by the imperturbable rest of 
the calciumfloceuli, which never show the least trace of a cyclonic 
configuration *), although according to Harre and also as appears 
from their angular velocity *), which Fox found to be somewhat 
smaller, they are probably even a little nearer to the spots than the 
hydrogen floeculi. 
So it is on account of all these old and new direct evidences that 
I have come to the conviction that the spots are no material vortices., 
Neither the spectroheliographs of Hare, nor his discovery that there 
are lines in the spectrum of the spots, which most probably show 
the Zeeman effect ‘), „have been able to indirectly weaken my con- 
victign. 
So, if, according to me the spots are no material vortices, but 
when the cyclonic configuration of the hydrogen-flocculi still reminds 
us in some degree of such vortices (vortices to be sure, according to 
Hate “so complex’, I should prefer to say “so impossible” that, 
not unfrequently they show opposed motions in neighbouring places) *) 
we have now to explain how, also without material vortices, such 
a quasi-eyelonie configuration can originate. 
A few years ago already I showed a way to come to that expla- 
1) Hate: Contrib. 26 p. 15. 
2) Hate: Astroph. Journ. April 1908. — Fox: Astroph. Journ. Sept. 1908. 
3) HALE : Contrib. 26 p, 1, 6; Plate XXXVI. 
4) Nature, Aug. 20 1908. 
5) Hare: Contrib. 26 p. 6 “Although most of the points in a given region 
appear to move together, there are a sufficient number of apparently oppose 
motions to weaken seriously the value of the evidence”, 
