Page:Williamherschel00simegoog.djvu/178

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166
HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK

either blood-red streak or corona. There is no reason to believe that he even read of them. His pigmy mountains of three or four hundred miles were molehills to the vast tongues of red flame shot up from the burning ocean of the sun's surface to a height of 200,000 miles in a few minutes, rising from and falling back into that ocean's bosom in a couple of hours. Herschel would have revelled in these gigantic strides of living flame. He would have cast away his theory of solid body, atmosphere and luminous solar clouds. Probably he would have held fast to his comparison of the light-clouds to our northern lights, and to his idea that the comets help to maintain the light and heat of our sun. How his glory is kept up from age to age, from millennium to millennium, we know as little as he did. Truly we are only at the beginning of our knowledge of this and other glorious stars; Herschel may have thought, and probably did think, that we were nearly at the end.