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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
justly — as already established. The influence of Faye’s doubts 
about the corona has been far less than that of his doubts about 
the prominences in 1860. In the plan of operations proposed 
for Dr. Huggins’s party, in particular, one can trace no signs 
of any evil influence exerted by these doubts. Every suggested 
observation is such as will tell. The spectroscopic observations 
will either reveal new bright-lines in the coronal spectrum, or 
exhibit the Frauenhofer lines, or else prove that the spectrum 
really presents no other features than were seen by the Ameri- 
can observers, Young and Pickering. The operations of Cap- 
tain Noble and the Eev. F. Howlett, as auxiliaries in these ob- 
servations, will be especially valuable ; for we shall not only 
have unexceptionable evidence as to the parts of the corona 
actually analysed, but also full information as to the figure of 
the parts examined ; and this, combined with Dr. Huggins’s 
study of the structure of the corona, as seen in the telescope, 
can hardly fail to lead to results of the utmost interest and 
significance. 
I should be led to attach almost equal importance to the 
telescopic and spectroscopic observations to be made by Mr. 
Lockyer’s party, were it not for the unfortunate doubts which 
Mr. Lockyer himself entertains respecting the corona’s posi- 
tion. One cannot fail to recognise in his instructions the 
effects of these doubts ; the suggested observations seeming to 
have scarcely any other end than to solve them. There is also 
another strange opinion of Mr. Lockyer’s, which seems almost 
certain to exercise an unsatisfactory influence upon the observa- 
tions made by his party. He holds the chromosphere as seen 
by aid of the spectroscope to be only the lower portion of an 
envelope extending, in reality, far above the highest of the 
prominences. This seems to me a strange delusion. No one 
familiar with the history of former total eclipses can fail to 
recognise the fact that the outline of the chromosphere — or, 
as the discoverers of the layer called it, the sierra — is as well 
defined as that of the prominences. There is indeed not a par- 
ticle of evidence tending to the belief that in eclipses it would 
appear otherwise than in the valuable drawings which Profes- 
sor Eespighi has obtained by aid of the spectroscope. Indeed, 
I might go much farther, and say that everything we know of 
the chromosphere points to the belief that it is not a solar 
atmosphere at all, as has been assumed, but is formed rather 
of small prominences and of the remains of those loftier pro- 
minences which Zollner and Eespighi have watched sinking 
back towards the solar surface. . The gaseous envelope into 
which these gaseous prominences are projected to vast heights, 
and through which they sink slowly back, is doubtless to be 
regarded as the true solar atmosphere, and not that glowing 
