It may vary in color as in
conspicuousness. The fascination of that extraordinary sight has never
faded from my memory. I turned to regard it again and again, although
I had never seen the stellar heavens so brilliant, and it was one of
the last things I looked for when the morning glow began softly to
mount in the east, and Sicily and the Mediterranean slowly emerged
from the profound shadow beneath us.
The Zodiacal Light seems never to have attracted from astronomers in
general the amount of careful attention that it deserves; perhaps
because so little can really be made of it as far as explanation is
concerned. I have referred to the restraint that scientific writers
apparently feel in speaking of it. The grounds for speculation that it
affords may be too scanty to lead to long discussions, yet it piques
curiosity, and as we shall see in a moment has finally led to a most
interesting theory. Once it was the subject of an elaborate series of
studies which carried the observer all round the world. That was in
1845--46, during the United States Exploring Expedition that visited
the then little known Japan. The chaplain of the fleet, the Rev. Mr
Jones, went out prepared to study the mysterious light in all its
phases. He saw it from many latitudes on both sides of the equator,
and the imagination cannot but follow him with keen interest in his
world-circling tour, keeping his eyes every night fixed upon the
phantasm overhead, whose position shifted with that of the hidden sun.
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