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“That little Vernier, on whose slender lines

The midnight taper trembles as it shines,

Tells through the mist where dazzled Mercury burns,

And marks the point where Uranus returns.”

But within a comparatively few years a new branch of astronomy has arisen, which studies sun, moon, and stars for what they are in themselves, and in relation to ourselves. Its study of the sun, beginning with its external features (and full of novelty and interest, even, as regards those), led to the further inquiry as to what it was made of, and then to finding the unexpected relations which it bore to the earth and our own daily lives on it, the conclusion being that, in a physical sense, it made us and re-creates us, as it were, daily, and that the knowledge of the intimate ties which unite man with it brings results of the most practical and important kind, which a generation ago were unguessed at.

This new branch of inquiry is sometimes called Celestial Physics, sometimes Solar Physics, and is sometimes more rarely referred to as the New Astronomy. I will call it here by this title, and try to tell the reader something about it which may interest him, beginning with the sun.