PART iv. OCCASIONAL PHENOMENA. 47 



being dependent on what causes the far grander mani- 

 festations in the sun, which we, at our distance of 92 

 millions of miles, simply call " spots." 



But there is still another and a very recent cosmical 

 instance of very widely admitted electric influences from 

 one body of the solar system to another, which has a 

 singular claim for being mentioned on the present occa- 

 sion. For on the very night of the cloud, or June 26, 

 it so chanced that a few of the inhabitants of Madeira 

 first caught sight of Tebbutt's great comet of 1881 

 coming up from the south, and proving itself presently 

 to be one of the grandest comets of very recent times. 

 As, moreover, it soon became circumpolar to northern 

 observers, it was more closely studied at all the large 

 European and American observatories, by both telescopic 

 and spectroscopic scrutiny, than had ever been the case 

 with any former comet. And the general conclusion 

 seems to be, that the chief phenomena then witnessed 

 can only be explained by electrical influences reaching 

 the comet from the sun, though the distance between the 

 two bodies might be even greater than that between the 

 sun and our earth. 



On this subject Dr. Huggins, in his lecture of January 

 20, 1882, before the Royal Institution, London, says at 

 his tenth page: " There seems to be a rapidly-growing 

 feeling among physicists that both the self-light of comets 

 and the phenomena of their tails belong to the order of 

 electrical phenomena." And again, on his page u, 



