The Corona Of The Sun

One of the greatest mysteries of ecience, says Youth's Companion, is that magnificent display of coronal streamers and soft banners of light that is seen around the totally eclipsed sun. Several recent investigations tend to 6how that this wonderful phenomenon is of electric or magnetic origin. Mr. M. I. Pupin, of Columbia college, has just furnished most suggestive f acts bearing upon this question, through a series of experiments on electric discharges in imperfect vacua. Photographs of such discharges, made by Mr. Pupin, bear an astonishing resemblance to the solar corona. Inasmuch as the space immediately around the sun must almost necessarily contain large quantities of vapors and meteoric dust, it does not seem difficult to conceive that a condition of things exists there which is suited to electric manifestations on an immense scale. Yet, after all, when we think of the tremendous energy of the sun. which is able to make daylight upon the earth, to warm with its life-supporting ravs planets that circle around it at a distance of tens and hundreds of millions of miles, and to awaken the magnetism of our globe until the air is aflame with auroral lights, we can hardly wonder that it should cause the nearer regions of space around its own sphere to glow with strange radiance.