Herschel obtained (1797) some evidence of variability in the satellites of Jupiter, which appeared to him to support this hypothesis.
Herschel's observations of other planets were less numerous and important. He rightly rejected the supposed observations by Schroeter (§ 271) of vast mountains on Venus, and was only able to detect some indistinct markings from which the planet's rotation on an axis could be somewhat doubtfully inferred. He frequently observed the familiar bright bands on Jupiter commonly called belts, which he was the first to interpret (1793) as bands of cloud. On Mars he noted the periodic diminution of the white caps on the two poles, and observed how in these and other respects Mars was of all planets the one most like the earth.
268. Herschel made also a number of careful observations on the sun, and based on them a famous theory of its structure. He confirmed the existence of various features of the solar surface which had been noted by the earlier telescopists such as Galilei, Scheiner, and Hevel, and added to them in some points of detail. Since Galilei's time a good many suggestions as to the nature of spots had been thrown out by various observers, such as that they were clouds, mountain-tops, volcanic products, etc., but none of these had been supported by any serious evidence. Herschel's observations of the appearances of spots suggested to him that they were depressions in the surface of the sun, a view which derived support from occasional observations of a spot when passing over the edge of the sun as a distinct depression or notch there. Upon this somewhat slender basis of fact he constructed (1795) an elaborate theory of the nature of the sun, which attracted very general notice by its ingenuity and picturesqueness and commanded general assent in the astronomical world for more than half a century. The interior of the sun was supposed to be a cold dark solid body, surrounded by two cloud-layers, of which the outer was the photosphere or ordinary surface of the sun, intensely hot and luminous, and the inner served as a fire-screen to protect the interior. The umbra (chapter vi., § 124) of a spot was the dark interior seen through an opening in the clouds, and the penumbra corresponded
