666 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



neath, suggested the bloom of a plum. As the day advanced, the 

 southeastern heaven became more luminous, and the pale disk of the 

 sun was at length seen struggling through drifting clouds. At ten 

 o'clock the sun had become fairly victorious, the heather was adorned 

 by pendent drops, while certain branching grasses, laden with liquid 

 pearls, presented, in the sunlight, an appearance of exquisite beauty. 

 Walking across the common to the Portsmouth road, my wife and I, 

 on reaching it, turned our faces sunward. The smoke-like fog had 

 vanished, but its disappearance was accompanied, or perhaps caused, 

 by the coalescence of its minuter particles into little globules, visible 

 where they caught the light at a proper angle, but not otherwise. 

 They followed every eddy of the air, upward, downward, and from 

 side to side. Their extreme mobility was well calculated to suggest a 

 notion prevalent on the Continent, that the particles of a fog, instead 

 of being full droplets, are really little bladders or vesicles. Clouds 

 are supposed to owe their power of floatation to this cause. This 

 vesicular theory never struck root in England ; nor has it, I apprehend, 

 any foundation in fact. 



As I stood in the midst of these eddying specks, so visible to the 

 eye, yet so small and light as to be perfectly impalpable to the skin 

 both of hands and face, I remarked, " These particles must surely yield 

 a bow of some kind." Turning my back to the sun, I stooped down so 

 as to keep well within the layer of particles, which I supposed to be a 

 shallow one, and looking toward the "Devil's Punch-Bowl," saw the 

 anticipated phenomenon. A bow without color spanned the Punch- 

 Bowl, and, though white and pale, was well defined and exhibited an 

 aspect of weird grandeur. Once or twice I fancied a faint ruddiness 

 could be discerned on its outer boundary. The stooping was not 

 necessary, and as we walked along the new Portsmouth road, with the 

 Punch-Bowl to our left, the white arch marched along with us. At a 

 certain point we ascended to the old Portsmouth road, whence, with a 

 flat space of very dark heather in the foreground, we watched the bow. 

 The sun had then become strong, and the sky above us blue, nothing 

 which could in any proper sense be called rain existing at the time in 

 the atmosphere. Suddenly my companion exclaimed, " I see the whole 

 circle meeting at my feet ! " At the same moment the circle became 

 visible to me also. It was the darkness of our immediate foreground 

 that enabled us to see the pale, luminous band projected against it. 

 We walked round Hind Head Common with the bow almost always 

 in view. Its crown sometimes disappeared, showing that the minute 

 globules which produced it did not extend to any great height in the 

 atmosphere. In such cases, two shining buttresses were left behind, 

 which, had not the bow been previously seen, would have lacked all 

 significance. In some of the combes, or valleys, where the floating 

 particles had collected in greater numbers, the end of the bow plung- 

 ing into the combe emitted a light of more than the usual brightness. 



