seems to obtain between the phenomena of sun-spots and terrestrial magnetic disturbances and aurora.

times were such as not to make such a with the spectra of the prominences. This rotation impossible, but the same appear-view of the corona would bring it within ances would have resulted if the corona the charmed circle of interaction which had not rotated, but shifted slightly in position. If the forces to which the corona is due have their seat in the sun, the corona would probably rotate with it. If the corona is produced by forces external to the sun, in this case the corona might not rotate.

Many questions remain unconsidered: among others, whether the light emitted by the gaseous part of the corona is due directly to the sun's heat, or to electrical discharges taking place in it of the nature of terrestrial aurora. Further, what becomes of the coronal matter on the theory which has been suggested? Is it perma

matter of the tails of comets is lost to them? Among other considerations, it may be mentioned that an electric repulsion can maintain its sway only so long as the repelled particle remains in the same electrical state; if, through an elec tric discharge, it ceases to maintain the electrical potential it possessed, the repulsion has no more power over it, and gravity will be no longer overpowered. If, when this takes place, the particle is not moving away with a velocity sufficient to carry it from the sun, the particle will return to the sun. Of course, if the effect of any electric discharges or other conditions has been to change the potential of the particle from positive to negative, or the reverse, as the case may be, then the repulsion would be changed into an attraction acting in the same direction as gravity. In Mr. Wesley's drawings of the corona, especially in those of the eclipse of 1871, the longer rays or streamers appear not to end, but to be lost in increasing faintness and diffusion, but certain of the shorter rays are seen to turn round and to descend to the sun.

To return to the state of things within the corona. We have seen that the corona consists probably of a sort of incandescent fog, which at the same time scatters to us the photospheric light. Now the behav-nently carried away from the sun as the ior of a gas in the near neighborhood of the sun would be very different from that of liquid or solid particles. A gas need not be greatly heated, even when near the sun, by the radiated solar energy; the hot gas from the photosphere would probably rapidly lose heat; but, on the other hand, liquid or solid particles, whether originally carried up as such, or subsequently formed by condensation, would absorb the sun's heat, and at coronal distances would soon rise to a temperature not very greatly inferior to that of the photosphere. The gas which the spectroscope shows to exist along with the incandescent particles of the coronal stuff may, therefore, have been carried up as gas, or have been in part distilled from the coronal particles under the enormous radiation to which they are exposed. Such a view would not be out of harmony with the very different heights to which different bright lines may be traced at different parts of the corona, and at different eclipses. For obvious reasons gases of different vapor densities would be differently acted upon by a repulsive force which varies as the surface, and to some extent would be winnowed from each other; the lighter the gas the more completely would it come under the sway of repulsion, and so would be carried up more rapidly than a gas more strongly held down by gravity. The relative proportions, at different heights of the corona, of the gases which the spectroscope shows to exist there and recently Captain Abney and Professor Schuster have shown that, in addition to the bright lines already known, the spectrum of the corona in 1882 gave the rhythmical group of the ultra-violet lines of hydrogen which are characteristic of the photographic spectra of the white stars, and some other lines also would undoubtedly vary from time to time, and depend in part upon the varying state of activity of the photosphere, and so probably establish a connection

It is difficult for us, living in dense air, to conceive of the state of attenuation probably present in the outer parts of the corona. Mr. Johnstone Stoney has calculated that more than twenty figures are necessary to express the number of molecules in a cubic centimetre of air, and Mr. Crookes has shown us in his tubes how brilliant matter, even when reduced to onemillionth part of the density of ordinary air, can become under electrical excitement; and yet it is probable that these tubes perhaps the nearest terrestrial analogue of the thin matter of the corona

must be looked upon as crowded cities of molecules as compared with the sparse molecular population of the great coronal wastes.*

* For the history of opinion of the nature of the

Here it is well to stop, especially as new information as to the state of things in the corona may be expected from the daily photographs which will shortly be commenced at the Cape of Good Hope by Mr. Ray Woods, under the direction of Dr. Gill. WILLIAM HUGGINS.

From The National Review.
THE GERMAN ABROAD.

Germany was left desolate and exhausted. Her fields lay untilled, her forests had been wasted with fire, her commerce dislocated, while something like two-thirds of her population had perished. So appalling did the want of men and labor seem at the time that even the Catholic Church, according to some historians, sanctioned marriage among its priests. From that time to the beginning of this century, Germany practically retires from the field of colonial and commercial activ ity; for, whatever may be the last motives which impel the emigrant to leave his home, the necessary condition of successful colonization in the modern world is the presence of a redundant population at home. Moreover, the policy of the petty governments into which the country was broken up, was now uniformly directed to attracting and then restricting labor. This was absolutely necessary in the first place for the actual cultivation of the soil. In 1768 the humanitarian emperor, Joseph II., issued a warning to the princes of the Holy Roman Empire against allowing the migration of their subjects for this reason. With the rise of political ambitions an additional motive was supplied. In Prussia and elsewhere the serfs contributed exclusively the rank and file of the armies, which were officered by the nobility, while the commercial classes were exempted from military service.

I. THE present movement in Germany towards colonial expansion promises to set in its right place the part played by her people in the settlement of the earth. This has been hitherto underestimated, as Germany has established no colonies of her own, and up to the present century her colonial activity has been intermittent. But the colonizing instinct has, since the earliest times, been innate in the German character. For centuries the history of civilization in north Germany is the history of the gradual conquest of the eastern provinces from the Wends, and of the patient reclamation of the soil. By their superior persistence and industry the Teutonic settlers pushed back in turn the various Sclavic populations whose irruptions had once thrust them to the west. Under different conditions the struggle continues at the present day, and German thrift and discipline After a long interval German population even now gain ground in the Baltic prov- began to recover itself in the last century. inces of Russia. This expansion of Ger- But the process was gradual, and it remany to the east was followed by the rise ceived a heavy blow from the Seven Years' of the great Hanseatic commerce. Nor | War, and again from the protracted Na can there be much doubt that, if the towns poleonic struggle. During the eighteenth of the Hansa had retained their commer-century the only considerable emigration cial pre-eminence, and if the steady increase of German population had been left unhindered, German enterprise in due time would have claimed its share in the allotment of the New World. But at the decisive epoch the heaviest calamity she ever experienced, and one that influenced the whole of her succeeding history and retarded her development, fell upon Germany.

The religious troubles of the sixteenth | century drew to a head in the great religious war. When the Peace of Westphalia was signed, and the storm which had raged through the length and breadth of the land for nearly thirty years, was at last spent,

corona see "The Sun," by Professor Young; and "The Sun, the Ruler of the Planetary System," and various essays, by Mr. Proctor. See also papers by Professor Norton, Professor Young, and Professor Langley in the American Journal of Science.

was Catharine the Second's great importation of German peasants into southern Russia. And in connection with this appears for the first time that deep-rooted aversion to paying the blood-tax of conscription, which became an article of faith with the Menonite sect, and removed it wholesale from the Dantzig region.

II. After the Treaty of Paris the enor mous reproductive vigor of the German race soon reasserted itself, and the surplus population began to swarm off in ever larger numbers. The stream of emigration which had begun to dribble into New York before the close of last century, where the son of a Baden butcher had already established the future fortunes of the Astors, assumed its present volume and importance about 1820. Since that time it has kept roughly proportionate to the growth of population, increasing tem

porarily when wars and rumors of war | ters of a million subjects of German origin, have been in the air, and subsiding, as chiefly of the Bauer class, and they supply they disappeared, to its normal limits. the best agricultural labor in his dominTaking the last sixty years from 1822, the ions. But, unlike their brethren in the total number of German immigrants into more congenial atmosphere of America, North America was something over three they refuse to throw off their Deutschmillions, and the last decade has con- thum, and remain in unyielding oppositributed a million alone. They have in- tion to their unsympathetic environment. creased and multiplied in the land of their Among the steppes of new Russia, or adoption, and the United States contain along the flat banks of the shallow Volga, to-day some seven million citizens in all the traveller will come upon more than of German origin, who, according to many one cluster of villages with high-pitched observers, are destined to become the pre-roofs, bearing the familiar names of Weidominant element in the new community. mar, Strasburg, Mannheim, etc., which It has certainly pervaded the whole or- witness to the existence of a secret Heim. ganization of society. German names are weh, æternum sub pectore vulnus. Conto be found among the leading merchants, siderable agricultural colonies have simithe great financiers, and, to a minor exlarly grown up unnoticed in South Amertent, among the politicians, and if they ica. In Rio Grande do Sul and the occur less frequently than might be ex- adjacent provinces, German settlers have pected, it must be remembered that a rendered their territory the garden of regular process of converting German Brazil; have given the landscape a new into English names, according to their character with their Lutheran churches, signification, was instituted in the New and are wealthy and numerous enough to York of last century. support five German newspapers.

The German settler, as a rule, makes a less enterprising pioneer than the British. He is averse to giving hostages to fortune, and trusts rather to patient industry along the beaten tracks. But where the English or Scotch American has pushed to the West or found a new mining-camp, the less adventurous Teuton follows, and, with his genius for plodding industry, not unfrequently reaps the fruits of the others' daring. Accordingly the mass of the German Americans may be found within the more settled eastern and central States. A large proportion go to recruit the territorial democracy, and an almost equally large number find employment in the nines, on roads and railways, and in the engineering sheds. The female im migrants do something to supply the general want of domestic servants, and the ubiquitous German Kellner is almost as well known in New York as in Dresden or Vienna. A small residue, again, which has carried into the New World the impracticable ideas and habits which made residence in the fatherland impossible, sink into the discontented urban populations among which Socialistic ideas are germinating freely.

Vast as their powers of assimilation are, the United States, however, do not absorb all the redundant population of Germany. Though no longer imported and settled in large bodies by improving empresses as an example of thrift, the peasants still find their way across the Russian frontier. The czar now counts nearly three quar

Far away, also, under less clement skies, their perseverance has reclaimed a prosperous domain amid the swamps of the Dobrudscha. The Menonite settlement which lately passed under the Roumanian government numbers one hundred thousand souls. The beginnings of smaller settlements, again, are noticeable in Syria and Thessaly, intent on bringing under cultivation long-desolate tracts.

In England and in other populous countries the position of the German settler is naturally different. The immigration into England began with the political refugees of 1848, and developed its present charac ter and proportions much later. At this moment the German element in England is probably under-estimated at two hundred and fifty thousand. It is concentrated in the large towns. The metropolis alone is credited with one hundred thousand German adults, and its German population suffices to support four newspapers, while a daily average inportation of twelve thousand five hundred journals keeps it in touch with the fatherland. Manchester and Liverpool can boast an other thirty thousand between them, engaged in commerce and finance. Indeed, according to a common saying, half the members of the Stock Exchange are now Germans, and this very exaggeration indicates the position they have acquired in the world of Capel Court. The majority, however, are rather to be found in the lower walks of commercial life.

The German clerk has become a con

spicuous feature in the city, and tends to | is distinguished above all others by the bring down still lower the scanty salaries ease with which he effects this change. of the class to which he belongs. There are eating-houses in the neighborhood of Mark Lane where the midday visitor might fancy himself transported into Hamburg, so general are the guttural_interjections around him. Germans throng, again into several industries, while in the East-end there is a large but by no means prosperous body of tailors, whom Professor Boyce found it prudent, for electoral purposes, to address in their own tongue. Even into France the intruding German has found his way. He has engrossed several branches of trade into his hands, has come to be the principal maker of the elegant articles du Paris, and from time to time provokes an outburst of indignant chauvinism. According to consular reports, exclusive of citizens of German descent, the republic shelters and main-sians in the late war, and now the Roumatains eighty thousand subjects of the Hohenzollerns. His presence is also felt in Italy, Hungary, and the Austrian Slav States. The same qualities win him a foothold everywhere; he works harder, lives cheaper, and asks less than the native. He threatens, indeed, in these respects, to become to other Europeans what the Chinese have become to the American.

Certainly in America and Australia his complaint holds good. The vulgar system of transforming German into English names has already been remarked, and in the second generation the immigrant is entirely American, ostentatiously affecting to "schbick de Inglisch only." Elsewhere the process of transition does not go on so readily. In Russia the German settler exemplifies the fundamental antagonism of Slav and Teuton, and retains a sense of his origin and inherent superior- . ity among his more indolent neighbors. But in Russia the Bauer is contributing to the wealth, not only of a rival, but perhaps of a hostile nationality. He labors again, even in Brazil, under religious and civil disabilities; in the Dobrudscha the German villages were harried by Circas

Not content with the necessarily rough estimates of the number of German-descended settlers abroad, the imperial government last year set on foot a careful statistical inquiry into the number of expatriated German-born subjects. The returns are as yet incomplete, and do not embrace Russia or Asia. But they are significant as showing the direction this vast emigration takes. Out of nearly two and a half millions of German-born subjects in other lands, America contains one million nine hundred thousand, France and Switzerland respectively about eighty thousand, and England forty thousand.

nian government seeks to plant its own husbandmen on the lands reclaimed by German industry. In other European countries the emigrant is forced to win a difficult footing by undertaking the most toilsome and unremunerative labor. He is, indeed, reduced into being a hewer of wood and drawer of water for alien peoples.

Apart from these sentimental motives there are urgent political and economical reasons why the demand for a greater Germany, for a German exit to carry off this surplus population, should now be made. A military empire depends upon its supply of recruits, and according to Bismarck's somewhat paradoxical theory, the emigrants are drawn from among the most capable and energetic citizens. This continual drain of military strength can hardly be looked upon without apprehension.

Again the economical loss to Germany by this outgoing of productive labor is tremendous. It has been calculated at an annual sum of £15,000,000, and for the last fifty years to amount to a capital sum of £700,000,000. These figures are probably pitched too high, but the substantial fact remains the same.

It could hardly be expected that Germany, animated by a proud consciousness of her newly won national existence, should look upon this expatriation of her children with equanimity. There are many things in the position of their breth- III. At the same time the vital necesren abroad which are only too galling sity of relieving Germany by an annual to the pride of the arbiters of Europe. Auswanderung is now fully recognized. Hardest of all, perhaps, for the German The necessity becomes daily more urgent. patriot to bear is the spectacle of his coun- In Germany the birth-rate per mille has trymen easily surrendering their Deutsch- advanced to thirty-eight; in Great Britain thum, putting on another nationality like it stands at thirty-five, giving a yearly in a cloak, and becoming oblivious of the crease in population for the two countries common home. According to Hartmann's of six and four hundred thousand respecdismal lamentations, the German emigrant | tively. Hence every walk of life is con

gested in the empire, and in the lower | aspirations, are very great. Germany has strata of society the struggle for existence to make up the lee-way of two centuries, has become almost internecine. The artisans have no accumulated resources to fall back upon as in England, and the pressure of the agricultural class upon the soil, for all its thrift and economy, is fearfully severe. The struggle tells chiefly, of course, upon life in its weaker stages, and the returns of infant mortality indicate how desperate it has become, how shrunken is the margin between production and consumption, and what the terrible remedy is which nature is constrained to supply. In populous tracts in the heart of the empire the rate of infant mortality reaches forty, and even fortyfive, per mille. In corresponding English districts it does not rise above twenty.

to recover the start which England obtained while she was torn and exhausted by recurring war. The suitable zones of the world are apparently already occupied, and neither the acquisition of islands in the Pacific, nor placing barren coasts or fever-swamps in Africa under the imperial ægis, will serve her purpose. Popular aspirations, indeed, point to a South African empire, incorporating the Transvaal and Cape Colony at our expense, and influential papers do not hesitate to air these aspirations. But neither these suggestions nor the more practicable demand for a Germany in South America have yet received the imprimatur of responsible politicians.

For the last twenty-five years individual IV. — A like necessity for making up thinkers have proclaimed the importance lost lee-way dominates the simultaneous of organizing German colonies to carry movement towards commercial extension. off this surplus population regularly, of Germany entered the commercial arena preventing its absorption into foreign peo-long after England had covered the globe ples, and of utilizing it for the common weal. For years their exhortations remained like the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The country was engaged in consolidating its national existence; a superficial glance revealed the fact that the more desirable spaces of the earth's surface were filled up, and the official classes looked upon the proposal askance. Proud of the great work its industry and intelligence had already achieved, the Beamtenstand was confident of its ability to solve the newer problems by readjusting the relations of labor and capital, and by modifying the social organization.

with the network of her shipping routes and her credit system. To reduce the advantage gained, and to bring up their own lines to a level, a subvention is to be paid out of the national revenues. An examination of the four subsidized lines originally proposed, to China, Australia, Bombay, and South Africa, shows that they were meant to compete directly with existing English routes. In the same way the projected Transmarine Bank is to contend with the ubiquitous English banking and credit organization, of which the Germans are forced to avail themselves. Indeed, the Cologne Gazette has lately computed that by the use of En. glish carrying ships, and by the payment of bank commissions, etc., Germany contributes a tax of £25,000 a day to the wealth of this country.

Handicapped, however, as German commerce has been, it has lately made great strides over-seas, thanks to its distinguish

The task has proved more formidable than was anticipated, and the attitude of the Socialists' has disabused the bureaucracy of its confidence. In opposition even to the enticing schemes of the iron chancellor they show themselves determined to insist on their own inadmissible scheme of social reconstruction. Nor do they manifest more favor towards the co-ing qualities of thrift and industry. Gerlonial panacea; some of their leaders, man competition is felt severely in the far indeed, have denounced it in the bitterest East, and has cut down profits at Hongterms, both as impracticable and as an kong to a minimum. And though the ignis fatuus likely to lead the nation bulk of the foreign trade of China remains astray from the true path of salvation. with the English, the coasting trade is On the other hand, the commercial classes rapidly passing into German hands. In are warm in its support, and German con- South America they have secured a still servatism generally hopes for the effect larger share of her trade; their agents are which a greater Germany may possibly active in the Pacific; and, besides the exercise in diverting the imagination of new territory of Lüderitzland, more than the working classes from internal Utopias. sixty factories have recently been estabBut the difficulties in the way of established along the African coast, from Sierra lishing transmarine agricultural colonies, Leone to Ambriz, while German influence and this is the central aim of German | had apparently gained a temporary ad