vourite pursuits at Patricroft, and on his retirement became his
serious study. By repeated observations with a powerful reflecting
telescope of his own construction, he succeeded in making a very
careful and minute painting of the craters, cracks, mountains, and
valleys in the moon's surface, for which a Council Medal was awarded
him at the Great Exhibition of 1851. But the most striking discovery
which he has made by means of big telescope--the result of patient,
continuous, and energetic observation--has been that of the nature of
the sun's surface, and the character of the extraordinary light-giving
bodies, apparently possessed of voluntary motion, moving across it,
sometimes forming spots or hollows of more than a hundred thousand
miles in diameter.

The results of these observations were of so novel a character that
astronomers for some time hesitated to receive them as facts.[6] Yet
so eminent an astronomer as Sir John Herschel does not hesitate now to
describe them as "a most wonderful discovery." "According to Mr.
Nasmyth's observations," says he, "made with a very fine telescope of
his own making, the bright surface of the sun consists of separate,
insulated, individual objects or things, all nearly or exactly of one
certain definite size and shape, which is more like that of a willow
leaf, as he describes them, than anything else. These leaves or scales
are not arranged in any order (as those on a butterfly's wing are), but
lie crossing one another in all directions, like what are called spills
in the game of spillikins; except at the borders of a spot, where they
point for the most part inwards towards the middle of the spot,[7]
presenting much the sort of appearance that the small leaves of some
water-plants or sea-weeds do at the edge of a deep hole of clear water.
The exceedingly definite shape of these objects, their exact similarity
one to another, and the way in which they lie across and athwart each
other (except where they form a sort of bridge across a spot, in which
case they seem to affect a common direction, that, namely, of the
bridge itself),--all these characters seem quite repugnant to the
notion of their being of a vaporous, a cloudy, or a fluid nature.
Nothing remains but to consider them as separate and independent
sheets, flakes, or scales, having some sort of solidity. And these
flakes, be they what they may, and whatever may be said about the
dashing of meteoric stones into the su