643 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



SBJ* 



pread 



when we remember that we can perceive 

 many hundreds of such systems of suns. 



Thus we learn how an excess of light may 

 hide more than it reveals. . . . Night 

 has its revelations, more wonderful in real- 

 ity tho less splendid in seeming than the 

 sun which rules the day. PROCTOR Expanse 

 of Heaven, p. 218. (L. G. & Co., 1897.) 



3185. SPONTANEOUSNESS OF 

 GROWTH Progress without Endeavor Vo- 

 lition Simply Fulfils Conditions. There are 

 three lines along which one may seek for 

 evidence of the spontaneousness of growth. 

 The first is science. And the argument here 

 could not be summed up better than in the 

 words of Jesus. The lilies grow, he says, of 

 themselves; they toil not, neither do they 

 spin. They grow that is, automatically, 

 spontaneously, without trying, without fret- 

 ting, without thinking. Applied in any di- 

 rection to plant, to animal, to the body or 

 to the soul this law holds. A boy grows, 

 for example, without trying. One or two 

 simple conditions are fulfilled, and the 

 growth goes on. He thinks, probably, as 

 little about the condition as about the re- 

 sult; he fulfils the conditions by habit, the 

 result follows by nature. Both processes 

 go steadily on from year to year apart from 

 himself, and all but in spite of himself. One 

 would never think of telling a boy to grow. 

 A doctor has no prescription for growth. 

 He can tell me how growth may be stunted 

 or impaired, but the process itself is recog- 

 nized as beyond control one of the few and 

 therefore very significant things which Na- 

 ture keeps in her own hands. DRUMMOND 

 Natural Law in the Spiritual World, essay 

 3, p. 113. (H. Al.) 



3186. SPONTANEOUSNESS THE AT- 

 TRIBUTE OF HUMAN INTELLECT 



Mind of Man Included in Nature. We must 

 understand it [Nature] as including every 

 agency which we see entering, or can con- 

 ceive from analogy as capable of entering, 

 into the causation of the world. First 

 and foremost among these is the agency 

 of our own mind and will. Yet, strange 

 to say, all reference to this agency is 

 often tacitly excluded when we speak of 

 the laws of Nature. One of our most 

 distinguished living teachers of physical 

 science, Professor Tyndall, began, not long 

 ago, a course of lectures on the phe- 

 nomena of heat, by a rapid statement of the 

 modern doctrine of the correlation of forces 

 how the one was convertible into the 

 other how one arose out of the other how 

 none could be evolved except from some other 

 as a preexisting source. " Thus," said the 

 lecturer, " we see there is no such thing as 

 spontaneousness in Nature." What! not 

 in the lecturer himself? Was there no 

 " spontaneousness " in his choice of words 

 in his selection of materials in his order- 

 ly arrangement of experiments with a view 

 to the exhibition of particular results? It 



is not probable that the lecturer was in- 

 tending to deny this; it simply was that 

 he did not think of it as within his field 

 of view. His own mind and will were then 

 dealing with the " laws of Nature," but they 

 did not occur to him as forming part of 

 those laws, or, in the same sense, as sub- 

 ject to them. ARGYLL Reign of Law, ch. 1, 

 p. 4. (Burt.) -.tt-..^ 



3187. SPOTS ON THE SUN Cooled 

 Vapors Sinking Back on Central Mass A 

 Coolness Exceeding All Earthly Heat. Just 

 on the edge of these [sun-] spots there are 

 spectroscopic indications of the most violent 

 motion, and in their vicinity there are often 

 large protuberances; they show compara- 

 tively often a rotatory motion. They may 

 be considered to be places where the cooler 

 gases from the outer layers of the sun's at- 

 mosphere sink down, and perhaps produce 

 local superficial coolings of the sun's mass. 

 To understand the origin of these phenom- 

 ena, it must be remembered that the gases, as 

 they rise from the hot body of the sun, are 

 charged with vapors of difficultly volatile 

 metals, which expand as they ascend, and, 

 partly by their expansion and partly by 

 radiation into space, must become cooled. 

 At the same time they deposit their more 

 difficultly volatile constituents as fog or 

 cloud. This cooling can only, of course, be 

 regarded as comparative; their temperature 

 is probably, even then, higher than any 

 temperature attainable on the earth. If 

 now the upper layers, freed from the heav- 

 ier vapors, sink down, there will be a space 

 over the sun's body which is free from cloud. 

 They appear then as depressions, because 

 about them are layers of ignited vapors as 

 much as 500 miles in height. HELMHOLTZ 

 Popular Lectures, lect. 4, p. 160. (L. G. & 

 Co., 1898.) 



3188. 



Solar Rotation 



Revealed. The study of solar physics may 

 be said to have commenced with the dis- 

 covery of the sun-spots, about 267 years 

 ago. These spots were presently found to 

 traverse the solar disk in such a way as 

 to indicate that the sun turns upon an axis 

 once in about twenty-six days. Nor will this 

 rotation appear slow when we remember 

 that it implies a motion of the equatorial 

 parts of the sun's surface at a rate exceeding 

 some seventy times the motion of our swift- 

 est express trains. PROCTOR Other Worlds 

 than Ours, ch. 2, p. 35. ( Burt. ) 



3189. SPREAD OF A PEST The 



Russian Thistle. About twenty years ago 

 a colony of immigrants brought from the 

 plains of southern Russia to the prairie 

 region of Dakota a small quantity of flax- 

 seed. 



The flaxseed was sown in the fertile soil 

 of the new home. It sprouted and grew. 

 Along with it there also developed a slender, 

 reddish plant, which seemed natural enough 

 to the immigrants, for it had been common- 



