19 1 6. No. I. ARE THE SOLAR CORPUSCLE RAYS NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE? 1 9 



Similarly in Europe certain glacialists favour the view that there were 

 six glacial stages, others would reduce the number to three. 



Is it possible now to explain these remarkably great climatic changes 

 on the earth by corresponding variations in our helio-cathode ravs as the 

 primary cause ? 



It is certainly possible, if we can admit changes of correspondingly 

 long periods in the electric constitution of the sun, something like the 

 sunspot periods in my conception, but lure the time-intervals between the 

 different phases must be enormous. 



If we suppose that the magnetism of the sun, which, I believe, for the 

 greatest part is due to corpuscular circle-currents outside the sun, is aug- 

 menting, it will at last arrive at a critical point, where events will inter- 

 vene which will rapidly change the situation with respect to the corpus- 

 cular rays reaching the earth. 



For helio-cathode rays radiated in a normal manner from the sun's 

 surface we can indeed prove that if the rays reach a distance from the 

 centre of the sun greater than twice its radius, the rays will pass on to 

 infinity. But if the radiation is always to remain within a distance of 2 d 

 from the sun's centre we must have! 



i\ 



M ^ 



where M is the magnetic moment of the sun and a the radius of the sun. 

 //q^o corresponds to the emanated corpuscular rays (see »A. P.* pag. 617). 



When M is of the order 10--, as estimated by me in C. R. Jan. 24 

 1910 — it follows that //o?o !> 5 ^ lO'^ *or normally starting rays if the 

 rays are to be able to reach the earth and further to emerge into infinity. 

 We have indeed found the condition fulfilled, for from the experiments 

 and observations we deduced: //• o = 3 X 10'^ for rays which penetrated 

 into the earth's auroral zone. 



Now if the sun's magnetic moment M increased, it would accordingly 

 arrive at a point where suddenly the whole ray-disc round the sun would 

 disappear, and the rays would circulate quite near the sun's surface, or 

 return to the sun. Here it is for the sake of simplicity assumed that all 

 the corpuscular rays in the disc have the same stiftness. 



What is said here applies only to helio-cathode rays. With atom-rays, 

 radiant matter, when gravitation has to be considered, the result is in 

 certain cases somewhat different, as seen in -A. P.« p. 706. 



We have in the experiments described in »Aurora Polaris •^ a great 

 many photographs representing phenomena corresponding to the sudden 

 changes in the distribution as mentioned above. 



