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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
New Comet. — The new comet discovered by Coggia has not presented 
any special telescopic features of interest up to the present time. Secchi 
has found that the nucleus presents a spectrum resembling that of carbon — a 
fact already observed in the case of Encke’s comet, and Brorsen’s. 
Structure of the Solar Photosphere. — Mr. S. P. Langley communicates the 
results of his study of the sun’s surface with a fine 13-inch refractor at the 
Allegheny Observatory, Pennsylvania. He has been successful in resolving 
the so-called rice-grains seen at Greenwich, by Huggins and by others, into 
minute components. “ By taking advantage,” he says, “ of the brief and 
rare intervals of definition, which admit the use of high powers of such a 
telescope, I found the rice-grains resolved into an order of minute com- 
ponents, scarcely hitherto observed. These components then form granules 
(a word used by others as a synonym for 1 rice-grains ’). They are very 
minute bodies, present over the whole solar surface, faintly discernible in 
the faculae, and in the penumbrae of the spots are expended into long fila- 
ments, whose aggregation forms the thatch-straws of Mr. Dawes, as the 
aggregation of granules forms the rice-grain. The latter term should be 
employed hereafter, I think, only so far as it may be necessary to recognise 
a tendency of these granules to unite in clusters of approximately uniform 
size. The granules are occasionally seen singly, more frequently united in 
clusters of from two or three, to ten or more, and by their degree of 
juxtaposition, and perhaps by their actual superposition, form the inequalities 
of brilliancy of the rice-grain noted by Mr. Huggins, and account for the 
irregular outline of the latter, which he has already remarked upon. With 
the largest apertures and powers, not only then do these brilliant bodies 
appear smaller, but from their apparent area is to be taken the minute dark 
spaces which it now appears intervene between their component parts.” He 
infers, after careful consideration of the probable real magnitude of these 
objects, that the sun’s light (which comes from them almost wholly) 
really proceeds from less than one-fifth of the sun’s whole surface. 
Contentions in the Astronomical Society. — The general meetings of this 
Society have lately been characterised by unpleasant contentions. In 1873 
Colonel Strange, Professor Pritchard, and Mr. Lockyer, combined in an 
unsuccessful attempt to remove from the Council the Secretary (Mr. Proctor), 
Sir Edmund Beckett, Captains Noble and Tupman, and Mr. Browning (Mr. 
Proctor resigned the Secretaryship last November, being then in America, 
and we believe that Sir E. Beckett and Mr. Browning declined to be put in 
nomination again). This year there appears to have been a falling-out 
among the dissentients of 1873, Colonel Strange objecting to Professor 
Pritchard as a Vice-president of the Society. The President, Professor 
Cayley, with his usual skill and judgment, brought the attack to a close by 
pointing out that Professor Pritchard was absent. We are glad to say that 
no attempt has been made to bring again before the Council the rejected 
scheme for obtaining a new government observatory for predicting the 
weather by studying the sun-spots. 
