"They have been conjectured to
be the smoke of volcanoes the scum floating upon an ocean of fluid
matter.... They have been taken for clouds .... explained to be opaque
masses swimming in the fluid matter of the sun...." When all his
anthropomorphic conceptions are put aside, Sir John Herschel, whose
intuition was still greater than his great learning, alone of all
astronomers comes near the truth--far nearer than any of those modern
astronomers who, while admiring his gigantic learning, smile at his
"imaginative and fanciful theories." His only mistake, now shared by
most astronomers, was that he regarded the "opaque body" occasionally
observed through the curtain of the "luminous envelope" as the sun
itself. When saying in the course of his speculations upon the Nasmyth
willow-leaf theory--"the definite shape of these objects, their exact
similarity one to another.... all these characters seem quite repugnant
to the notion of their being of a vaporous, a cloudy, or a fluid
nature"--his spiritual intuition served him better than his remarkable
knowledge of physical science.
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