130 LIGHT SCIENCE FOR LEISURE HOURS. 



chromatosphere and prominences, and deriving its 

 supplies from the very matter of the latter, matter 

 projected (as we daily witness) with such extreme 

 violence.' 



Here, properly speaking, my remarks respecting 

 the recent observations should be drawn to a close. 

 We have seen how those observations throw a new 

 light on all the circumsolar appendages, from the 

 complex shallow envelope forming the true solar 

 atmosphere, to the outermost extensions of the radiated 

 corona. The eclipse revealed nothing, directly, 

 respecting matter outside the coronal radiations. 

 But indirectly it gave important evidence respecting 

 a solar appendage which attains a far greater exten- 

 sion. I refer to that strange object, the zodiacal 

 light, emitted by a region which surrounds the sun on 

 all sides, to distances exceeding the orbit-ranges of the 

 planets Mercury and Venus, even if this region do not 

 reach far beyond the orbit of our own earth. It hap- 

 pens, by a strange chance, that the astronomer Liais, 

 whose long-doubted observations of the corona have 

 just been so strikingly confirmed, has but now 

 announced his discovery of the fact that the zodiacal 

 light, when analysed with the spectroscope, gives a 

 faint continuous spectrum. It had been asserted that 

 the zodiacal light gives a spectrum resembling that of 

 the aurora ; but grave doubts had been entertained 

 respecting the accuracy of the observations on which 

 this assertion had been based. The observation made 

 by Liais would tend to show that, as had been long 



