54 A CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN ASTRONOMY. 



These two men were William Huggins (born 

 1824) and Johann Carl Friedrich Zollner. The 

 latter astronomer, born in Leipzig in 1834, was 

 one of the most successful students of the solar 

 prominences. He was Professor of Astrophysics 

 in the University of Leipzig, a position which 

 he filled with success until his untimely death 

 on April 25, 1882. Independently of Huggins, 

 he found that by opening the slit of the 

 spectroscope wider, the forms of the promi- 

 nences themselves could be seen. The study 

 of the prominences was at once taken up by 

 the most famous solar observers : these were 

 Huggins and Lockyer in England, Sporer and 

 Zollner in Germany, Janssen in France, Secchi, 

 Respighi, and Tacchini in Italy, Young in 

 America. To Charles Augustus Young (born 

 1834) we owe the careful study of individual 

 prominences. On September 7, 1871, he ob- 

 served the most gigantic outburst on the sun 

 ever witnessed, fragments of an exploded promi- 

 nence reaching a height of 100,000 miles : Young, 

 also, made the first attempt to photograph the 

 prominences. 



To the Italian school of astronomers, however, 

 we owe the persistent and systematic study 

 of the prominences. Among them the three 

 greatest names are Angelo Secchi (1818-1878), 



