SOME NOTES ON JUPITER DURING HIS OPPOSITION OP 1876. 87 



the scientific world through the medium of the papers of astro- 

 nomical societies, periodicals, or books, I must confess it a matter 

 of great surprise, that so few and such crude attempts have yet 

 been made to give to the general astronomical reading public 

 an idea of the telescopic appearance of this, the most magnificent 

 of our planets ; and the reason I am at a loss to see ; for as I 

 have before said, Jupiter is certainly, excepting our Moon, the 

 easiest of all telescopic objects, and after a little practice, any one 

 I am sure, with a decent notion of using his pencil or chalks, may 

 give a far more accurate representation of the planet than he 

 will fiud in the most elaborate and expensive astronomical work 

 he can lay his hands on. Very few drawings ever represent 

 colours at all ; in a very extensively got up Avork I have in my 

 library the belts are represented as straight lines — as if, to save 

 trouble, they had been drawn with a ruler ; in others there is an 

 attempt at a ragged, cloudy appearance, but the artists who 

 represented them evidently drew from what they had heard 

 rather than from what they had seen. Messrs. De La Rue and 

 Lassell have both furnished what have been said to be remarkably 

 fine drawings, and probably the originals may be ; but if this is 

 the case a lithograph copy of one of them that I have seen must 

 be a most woeful libel. Mr. Browning, of London, has one or 

 two coloured representations of Jupiter ; his most recent, I think, 

 is that in the fifth volume of the " Student and Intellectual 

 Observer." The volume is now before you, and I should be glad 

 if any member present would tell me if it represents anything 

 like what he has ever seen of the planet. In making these 

 remarks, be it understood, I am not claiming for my own attempts 

 any superiority ; nobody can be more conscious than I am myself 

 of their shortcomings, and much that I have seen has baffled all 

 my endeavours to pourtray — as for instance, I have again and 

 again, on favourable opportunities, seen a perfectly metallic 

 appearance on some parts of the equatorial zone, which I cannot 

 even describe, much less draw ; so what I have said is not so 

 much to depreciate what has already been done, but to express a 

 surprise that more has not been done in this class of astronomical 

 work, by those who have the skill, the time, and the instrumental 

 means. 



You will notice that the circular of the Eoyal Astronomical 

 Society expresses that a connection has been supposed to exist 

 between some of the phenomena observed on Jupiter and the 

 maximum and minimum of the solar spots. From the evidence 

 as yet adduced it cannot be said at present to amount to more 

 than a supposition ; still, as Mr. Itussell very pertinently observed 

 on the first meeting of our Astronomical Section, speaking on this 

 subject — " We may not but believe that any disturbance aftecting 

 our ruler (the Sun), must pulsate through the whole retinue of 



