HERSCHEL SAW NO TOTAL ECLIPSE 165 



Glasgow. So far as spots are concerned, it works out 

 to an attractive and popular resemblance to truth. 

 Suppose a disturbance call it hurricane or tornado 

 to take place in the solar atmosphere. Everything is 

 on a gigantic scale, mountains, winds, waves in this 

 ocean of light. A mighty updraft from below rolls 

 back, for a longer or shorter time, the luminous solar 

 clouds. Into the vast pit thus laid open these clouds 

 pour a flood of light on the body and cloudy atmo- 

 sphere of the sun. The former looks black against the 

 light, but reveals mountains upwards of three hundred 

 miles in height; the latter, with its shelving sides, 

 returns more of the light, and is less black ; while the 

 shining matter, rolled back into waves of enormous 

 length and height, is heaped up in fiery storms round 

 the vast gulf. The dark body of the sun is called the 

 macula, or spot ; the better lighted atmospheric shield, 

 the penumbra ; and the heaped-up waves the faculce, 

 which give the sun's surface the roughness of aspect it 

 presents. 1 



This was all that Herschel saw or imagined. It was 

 far within the truth for awe-inspiring beauty, and for 

 the gigantic movements of these "luminous solar 

 clouds." Had he seen the " blood-red streak " of the 

 total eclipse of 1706, or the "corona" and "the ruddy 

 clouds" of that of 1715, the science of astronomy 

 would have been perhaps half a century in advance of 

 the position he left it in at his death. He did not see 



1 Had Herschel known and reflected on the letter of Sir Isaac Newton 

 printed in his Life, ii. 455, he would probably not have published this 

 theory. "The whole body of the sun, therefore, must be red-hot" is 

 Newton's conclusion. Even then it would look black against the sur- 

 face luminous clouds. 



