. 18, 1894. FEB. 19, 1894.

X.--PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SUN TAKEN AT THE ROYAL OBSERVATORY, GREENWICH,
SHEWING SUNSPOTS.]

[Sidenote: Attracted little attention, until eight years later.]

This brief announcement is all that the discoverer says upon the subject;
and it is perhaps not remarkable that it attracted very little attention,
especially when we remember that it related to a matter which the
astronomical world had agreed to put aside as unprofitable and not worth
attention. Next year, in giving his usual paper on the spots for 1844 he
recurs to the subject in the following sentence: "The periodicity of spots
of about ten years which was indicated in my summary published last year,
is confirmed by this year's observations." I have added in brackets to the
table above reproduced the numbers for 1844 subsequently given, and it
will be seen how nearly they might have been predicted.

[Sidenote: Other phenomena sympathetic and others not.]

Still the subject attracted little attention. Turning over the leaves of
the journal at random, I came across the annual report of the Astronomer
Royal of England, printed at length. But in it there is no reference to
this discovery, which opened up a line of work now strongly represented in
the annual programme of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Mr. Johnson
remarks that the only person who had taken it up was Julius Schmidt, who
then resided near Hamburg. But Schwabe went on patiently accumulating
facts; and in 1851 the great Von Humboldt in the third volume of his
_Cosmos_, drew attention to the discovery, which was accordingly for the
first time brought into general notice. It will be seen that there are not
many facts of general interest relating to the actual discovery beyond the
courage with which the work was commenced in a totally unpromising
direction, and the scant attention it received after being made for us. We
may admit that interest centres chiefly in the tremendous consequences
which flowed from it. We now recognise that many other phenomena are bound
up with this waxing and waning of the solar spots. We might be prepared
for a sympathy in phenomena obviously connected with the sun itself; but
it was an unexpected and startling discovery that magnetic phenomena on
the earth had also a sympathetic relation with the changes in sun-spots,
and it is perhaps not surprising that when once this connection of solar
and terrestrial phenomena was realised, various at