MaY 26 
ISM 
J 
ON THE TEMPERATURE AND STRUCTURE OF THE 
SUN. 
BY 
0. Lummer. 
Address delivered by invitation before the Philosophical Society of Wash- 
ington, March 21, 1907. 
Twenty years ago, while traveling on the Mediterranean 
to the Holy Land, I met a number of American clergymen, 
sent there by their churches, and I had occasion to listen to 
their sermons. They told their hearers of God’s almighty 
power and goodness, and illustrated by accounts of what they 
had seen in traveling around the world. The beautiful 
ocean, the brilliant blue sky, the lovely Italian country, all 
nature and its creatures, must impress upon us the idea of 
God, who governs all things. If such a superficial observa- 
tion of nature brings us nearer to an eternal being, how much 
more must the scientific man, who examines more closely 
into the play of forces in God’s universe, really appreciate 
their power and scope. Indeed, only the learned man of 
natural science reaches a conception of God in all its full- 
ness. 
The modern school of naturalists, and especially physicists, 
has little of the exaltation of our Haeckel. Our knowledge 
of things has been reduced to the standpoint of Du Bois- 
Reymond’s “ Ignoramus et Ignorabimus Indeed, when we 
ask ourselves what the aim of natural science is, we must 
answer: It is to study, not what is beyond the conceivable, 
but the laws of nature, to classify objects and phenomena 
outside ourselves, and to find the relations between effects 
and causes. Thus only do we become masters of the natural 
forces and turn them to the profit and benefit of mankind. 
Thus is blind idolatry replaced by adoration of the general 
12-Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 15. (75) 
