by Dr. C. W. Siemens at the Royal Society, and he published an article on “A New Theory of the Sun” in the April number of the Nineteenth Century. All who have read my essay on “The Fuel of the Sun” are surprised at the statement with which the magazine article opens, viz.: that this “may be termed a first attempt to open for the sun a debtor and creditor account, inasmuch as he has hitherto been regarded only as a great almoner pouring forth incessantly his boundless wealth of heat, without receiving any of it back.”
Some of my friends suppose that Dr. Siemens has wilfully ignored the most important element of my theory, and have suggested indignation and protest on my part. I am quite satisfied, however, that they are mistaken. I see plainly enough that although Dr. Siemens quotes my book, he had not read it when he did so; that in stating that “Grove, Humboldt, Zoellner, and Mattieu Williams have boldly asserted the existence of a space filled with matter,” he derived this information from the paper of Dr. Sterry Hunt which he afterward quotes. This inference has been confirmed by subsequent correspondence with Dr. Siemens, who tells me that he saw the book some years since but had not read it. My contributions to the philosophy of solar physics would have been far more widely known and better appreciated had I followed the usual course of announcing firstly “a working hypothesis,” to warn others off the ground, then reading a preliminary paper, then another and another, and so on during ten or a dozen years, instead of publishing all at once an octavo volume of 240 pages, which has proved too formidable even to many of those who are specially interested in the subject.
I am compelled to infer that this is the reason why so many of the speculations, which were physical heresies when expounded therein, have since become so generally adopted, without corresponding acknowledgment. This is not the place for specifying the particulars of such adoptions, but I may mention that in due time “An Appendix to the Fuel of the Sun,” including the whole history of the subject, will be published. The materials are all in hand, and only await arrangement. In the meantime I will briefly state some of the points of agreement and difference between Dr. Siemens and myself.
In the first place, we both take as our fundamental basis of speculation the idea of an universal extension of atmospheric matter, and we both regard this as the recipient of the diffused solar radiations, which are afterwards recovered and recondensed, or concentrated. Thus our “fuel of the sun” is primarily the same, but, as will presently be seen, our machinery for feeding the solar furnace is essentially different.
Certain desiccated pedants have sneered at my title, “The Fuel of the Sun,” as “sensational,” and have refused to read the book on this account; but Dr. Sterry Hunt has provided me with ample revenge. He has disentombed an interesting paper by Sir Isaac Newton, dated 1675, in which the same sensationalism is perpetrated with very small modification, Sir Isaac Newton’s title being “Solary Fuel.” Besides this, his speculations are curiously similar to my own, his fundamental idea being evidently the same, but the chemistry of his time was too vague and obscure to render its development possible. This paper was neglected and set aside, was not printed in the Transactions of the Royal Society, and remained generally unknown till a few months ago, when the energetic American philosopher brought it forth, and discussed its remarkable anticipations.
Dr. Siemens supposes that the rotation of the sun effects a sort of “fan action,” by throwing off heated atmospheric matter from his equatorial regions, which atmospheric matter is afterwards reclaimed and passed over to the polar regions of the sun. This interchange he describes as effected by the differences of pressure on the fluid envelope of the sun; the portion over the polar regions being held down by the whole force of solar gravitation, while the equatorial atmosphere is subject to this pressure, or attraction, minus the centrifugal impulse due to solar rotation. He maintains that this “centrifugal action, however small in amount as compared with the enormous attraction of the sun, would destroy the balance, and determine a motion towards the sun as regards the mass opposite the polar surface, and into space as regards the equatorial mass.” He adds that “the equatorial current so produced, owing to its mighty proportions, would flow outwards into space, to a practically unlimited distance.”
I will not here discuss the dynamics of this hypothesis; whether the reclaiming action of the superior polar attraction would occur at the vast distances from the sun supposed by Dr. Siemens, or much nearer home, and produce an effect like the recurving of the flame of his own regenerative gas-burner; or, whether he is right in comparing the centrifugal force at the solar equator with that of the earth, by simply measuring the relative velocity of translation irrespective of angular velocity. I will merely suggest that in discussing these, it is necessary, in order to do justice to Dr. Siemens, to always keep in mind the assumed condition of an universal and continuous atmospheric medium, and not to reason, as some have done already, upon the basis of a limited solar atmosphere with a definite boundary, from beyond which particles of atmospheric matter are to be flung away into vacuous space, without the intervention of all-pervading fluid pressure.
It is evident that if such fan action can bring back all the material that has received the solar radiations, and which holds them either as temperature or otherwise, the restoration and perpetuation of solar energy will be complete, for even the heat received by our earth and its brother and sister planets would still remain in the family, as they would radiate it into the interplanetary atmospheric matter supposed to be reclaimed by the sun.
But, as Mr. Proctor has clearly shown, the rays of the sun cannot do all the work thus required for his own restoration without becoming extinguished as regards the outside universe; and if the other suns—i.e., the stars—do the same they could not be visible to us.
Thus Dr. Siemens’ theory removes our sun from his place among the stars, and renders the great problem of stellar radiation more inscrutable than ever by thus putting the evidence of our great luminary altogether out of court.
My theory, on the contrary, demands only a gradual absorption of solar and stellar rays, such as actual observation of their varying splendor indicates.
If space were absolutely transparent, and its infinite depths peopled throughout, the firmament would present to our view one continuous blazing dome, as all the spaces between the nearer stars would be filled by the infinity of radiations from the more distant.
ANOTHER WORLD DOWN HERE.
What a horrible place must this world appear when regarded according to our ideas from an insect’s point of view! The air infested with huge flying hungry dragons, whose gaping and snapping mouths are ever intent upon swallowing the innocent creatures for whom, according to the insect, if he were like us, a properly constructed world ought to be exclusively adapted. The solid earth continually shaken by the approaching tread of hideous giants—moving mountains—that crush out precious lives at every footstep, an occasional draught of the blood of these monsters, stolen at life-risk, affording but poor compensation for such fatal persecution.
Let us hope that the little victims are less like ourselves than the doings of ants and bees might lead us to suppose; that their mental anxieties are not proportionate to the optical vigilance indicated by the four thousand eye-lenses of the common house-fly, the seventeen thousand of the cabbage butterfly and the wide-awake dragon-fly, or the twenty-five thousand possessed by certain species of still more vigilant beetles.
Each of these little eyes has its own cornea, its lens, and a curious six-sided, transparent prism, at the back of which is a special retina spreading out from a branch of the main optic nerve, which, in the cockchafer and some other creatures, is half as large as the brain. If each of these lenses forms a separate picture of each object rather than a single mosaic picture, as some anatomists suppose, what an awful army of cruel giants must the cockchafer behold when he is captured by a schoolboy!
The
