the resemblance between Martin Guerre and Arnold Tilh was so remarkable that they refused to say which of the two stood before them; from thirty to forty said decidedly that the accused was Martin, and about fifty more, equally positive, that he was Arnold. On the question of family likeness, Martin's son was pronounced to bear no resemblance to the prisoner, while Guerre's four sisters were found each as like her supposed brother "as two eggs. The decision of the judge at the close of the trial was against the prisoner, and he was sentenced to death. The prisoner appealed to the Parliament of Toulouse, and a new trial was granted. As Bertrande de Ross was to be a decisive witness, if the inquiries into her character proved satisfactory, these were very exactly made. All bore testimony to her blameless life and virtuous character. Would she have lived with the prisoner for three years, unless she had been firmly convinced he was her husband? The supposed husband and wife were confronted. His manner was frank, assured, and fearless; hers, confused, fluttering, and uncertain. He boldly charged her to tell the truth; to say whether he was, or was not, her husband. He would have no judge but herself, and was ready to suffer the punishment if she were prepared to affirm on oath that he was not Martin Guerre. She replied that she "would neither swear it nor believe it." This evasive reply seemed to strengthen the cause of the prisoner, but the judge hesitated to decide. Another inquiry began. Eighty of the former witnesses were selected, of whom nine or ten confirmed, and seven or eight denied, the assertion of the accused; the rest remained neutral. The result was an increase of perplexity. There was more than sufficient reason for believing that the prisoner was Martin Guerre, and quite as much for declaring him an impostor.

The great point to be proved by his accusers was that the person in question was Arnold Tilh. Arnold was irreligious, dishonest, unscrupulous, a drunkard and gambler. The likeness between him and Martin Guerre was so remarkable that nothing was easier than to mistake one for the other. His apparent knowledge of facts, which could only be known to Martin Guerre, merely proved that he had laid his plans very well, and informed himself exactly of all these particulars. No one ever thought of charging Bertrande with complicity in the plot.

Among the witnesses who spoke positively to the prisoner, Arnold Tilh, was one who swore that he had admitted this to him in confidence ; two deposed that they had recognized him. Guerre was a Biscayan, but the accused did not know the Basque dialect. The shoemaker employed by Martin Guerre swore that his number was twelve, while that of the prisoner was nine. Then the uncle of Tilh burst into tears on seeing him in chains; a strong evidence, as his recognition must be the ruin of his nephew.

Here was strong evidence; but, strange to say, that on the opposite side was equally convincing, and the latter witnesses had known Martin Guerre from childhood, while the others had, for the most part, only seen Tilh at different times and in casual interviews. There were one or two of the witnesses who, at first, were not sure whether the person was their old friend or not, and whom he convinced of the fact by reminding them of circumstances which could be known only to them and to Martin Guerre. He addressed them all by name, and varied his manner to Martin's intimate friends according to the degrees of intimacy which had subsisted. Could the cleverest impostor play a part so faultlessly? and who could have been his teacher? Either Bertrande— and she was above suspicion-or

Martin himself. And how could Martin have imbued him with his tastes, his ways of thinking, and all the little familiarities which individualize a character?

The slight personal dissimilarities which had been commented on were explained by the difference of age. He had grown much stouter; he had corrected his old slouching gait. Martin had a peculiar growth of the nail of one finger, a scar on the forehead, a blood-mark on the left eyeall of which were found on the pris

oner.

As he left Biscay when only two months old his ignorance of the language was easily accounted for. No one had ever heard Martin Guerre speak it. Arnold had lived a virtuous and steady life since his return, such as could hardly have been that of a previously worthless and dissipated character.

Never was evidence more equally balanced, nor public opinion more equally divided. The universal expectation was that a favorable view of the prisoner's case would be taken, when a new actor appeared upon the stage, the true Martin Guerre, the husband of Bertrande de Ross, witness and accuser at the same time. He was received suspiciously in spite of his wooden leg, and taken into custody. Things looked odd. Might not Pierre Guerre have started this new claimant.

His examination was not satisfactory. His answers were indeed correct, but the other claimant had replied more positively; and, when Arnold respectfully begged permission to question the man himself, a war of words ensued, in which the wooden-legged man used language of much violence, while the other preserved the composure which is supposed to proceed from a good conscience. All this may easily be accounted for if we place ourselves in the position of the respective parties.

Fresh witnesses, now called Arnold

Tilh's brothers, were summoned to appear in court, but nothing would prevail on them to do so. Then the new claimant was confronted with the Guerre family. The elder sister was the first to enter the court. For a minute or two she gazed on him fixedly, then she threw herself on his breast, weeping passionately, calling him by his name and imploring forgiveness. Her brother was no less agitated, embraced her affectionately, and freely forgave her error. The scene carried conviction to all. The other sisters were equally satisfied that this was really their brother; and all the other witnesses, even those who had been most positive, agreed that they had been deceived by the extraordinary resemblance, but that this was beyond a doubt Martin Guerre at last.

And now came poor Bertrande's turn. Every one felt for the pale, beautiful woman, who stood trembling at her door, as her eye fell on the stranger, for whose appearance she was, of course, quite unprepared. Her features became convulsed with emotion, and, with a wild cry, she fell at his feet, praying, with heartrending sobs, to be forgiven. Her beauty and distress touched all hearts but his; he had pitied and easily forgiven his sisters, but to his wife he remained inexorable. He could neither believe her nor forgive her, he said. It was impossible for a wife to mistake a stranger for her husband; she, and she alone, was the cause of the misery and dishonor which had befallen his house.

Arnold Tilh, whose identity was fully proved, made a confession before his death, and explained the story of his deception. He and Martin Guerre had been companions-in-arms, and he had learned from him much concerning his wife, his house, and circumstances, by which he determined to profit, and to accept the situation when he found people addressing him as Martin. Guerre on his return to his old neigh

borhood; and, by clever management, soon contrived to know quite enough of his friend's past life for the purposes he desired.

On the 12th September, 1560, Arnold Tilh was sentenced to death by

the Parliament of Toulouse, and on the 16th he paid the penalty of his crime. He was hanged before Martin Guerre's door, having begged pardon of him and his wife, with every sign of true contrition and penitence.

Ir is one of the most suggestive and important truths which science has embodied in the faith of philosophy, that space itself is not more "infinite" than are the sphere, number, and complexity of those unseen influences which affect the condition of the earth both as a planet and as a home and focus of sentient life. Astronomical research has thus before it an absolutely boundless field of discovery, which, in the course of ages, it is invited and encouraged to traverse; yet, may we not estimate its progress by the space it embraces, or its completeness by the range of the telescope; for their very haste to mark and note the prominent phenomena of the wide universe has prompted men to overlook the more obscure though powerful influences, which thicken the more closely they surround us, and it surely avails little that the color and place of stars and nebulosities are known, while those multiform agencies which centre in the sun and focate in the earth itself, are as yet unacknowledged, except in the infinite variety of their results.

The telescope with its present powers has indeed sketched out a wide region for patient observation and study, to be extended only when optical science shall afford some new, unthought of contribution to the means and appliances of sight; and astronomers have fitly left off for a time idly recounting the stars, and

indulging in vague speculations on what is beyond their ken, for the better purpose of examining minutely those phenomena which lie within the range, though their causes may be beyond the scope of distinct vision. Such agencies have hitherto been too commonly regarded as insignificant in comparison with more brilliant discoveries, but extending research every day gives further proof of their intimate relations to the condition and destiny of our mother earth.

We might instance the study of the laws of heat, light, magnetism, etc., as affording most important additions and aids to a science of which "astronomy" is an inadequate title; but in this paper we shall confine our attention to certain results of direct observation that promise to demonstrate many remarkable relations between the physical condition of the sun and that of the earth, and which continue to gain increasing interest, not only for astronomers, but for all intelligent

men.

Day by day, at the principal observatories in Europe and America, is the appearance of the sun anxiously watched, and the spots which often mottle much of its surface carefully mapped out, and even photographed. And, indeed, their utility recommends such observations; for gravitation, as we vaguely understand it, is not the only link which.

binds our planet to the sun; and we have yet to learn how much the development and present condition of the earth are due to the action of those thermal, magnetic, and chemical influences, which we have every reason to believe are intimately involved in its very existence and entire cosmical relations.

Before recounting the results of sun spot observations, we may remark the difficulty of tracing at a distance of ninety-five millions of miles, and on a visible disk having a diameter of little more than half a degree, the condition and appearances of a body whose diameter is more than one hundred times, and surface twelve thousand times, greater than those of the earth.

It is more than two centuries and a half since sun-spots were discovered, and known to reappear. The discovery is usually assigned to Galileo, whose first work on the subject, Epistola ad Valserum de Maculis Solaribus, is dated 1612; but the claims of the Tuscan artist may in this respect be fairly disputed in favor of Fabricius, whose treatise, De Maculis in Sole Observatis, was written at Wittenberg in June, 1611. Hariot, in England, published his observations in December, 1611; and Scheiner, a Jesuit of Ingolstadt, made some important discoveries early in 1612. Even before this time, spots on the sun had been observed by the naked eye, for Kepler is known to have mistaken one for a transit of Mercury.

Nor is it to be wondered at that these spots have not unfrequently been distinguished by the eye, when we consider the enormous dimensions of some of them. Pastorff observed one which he found to be 46,000 miles in length, and 27,960 broad; and Mayer, in 1758, saw one whose diameter was upwards of 45,000 miles, having an area greater than thirty times the entire surface of the earth. Now, it may easily be calculated that a circle at the distance

of the solar surface, having a diameter of one second of arc, has a diameter of 460 miles, and contains 167,000 square miles; and such an area would form a distinct speck, the smallest that can be seen as such. Yet spots of an area greater than a thousand millions of square miles have been recorded; and these having a diameter of a minute and a half, or about one-twenty-second that of the solar disk, must have been distinctly visible to all eyes under a clear atmosphere. Even the nuclei, or dark central parts, the cavities through which, according to Sir William Herschel, we see the body of the sun laid bare, are sometimes of enormous extent; so large," says one astronomer, "that the earth could pass clean through such a hole without coming within five thousand miles of either side."

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In shape, as in size, these spots are extremely irregular.

The outer portion, at least, of the sun is frequently in a state of commotion, to which the most terrific storm at sea suggests only the faintest possible conception. This appears to be extremely probable, both from the motions of the spots, and from the existence of those red flames, which, during a total eclipse, have been observed to project from all sides of the sun sometimes to a height of 40,000 miles. That the photosphere, or external luminous envelope, is in a continual state of undulation, is also indicated by those flashing patches of light called luculi, which have been observed in all regions of the sun's disk, giving an unequally shaded appearance to its surface, and producing an impression like that from the waves of the glistening sea.

The spots, however, are entirely confined to a belt of one hundred degrees within fifty degrees north and south of the sun's equator.

A single spot, as it appears under the telescope, consists usually of an irregularly shaped patch of at least

three distinctly separated degrees of shading. The central is the darkest, called the nucleus. The umbra forms a broad indented margin to the nucleus; and the penumbra, of a still slighter tint, surrounds the whole. Spots are frequently collected in groups; and so many as eighty distinct spots have sometimes been counted in a single group. Some spots appear to have two nuclei, and in others this singular change is observed in progress. They become bridged across by an embankment and ridges of the matter of the photosphere, and having a feathered appearance in one direction.

In the neighborhood of spots, and confined within the same limits of latitude, are certain remarkable streaks, brighter than the ordinary surface, which have been named faculæ. Some of these waves, whatever they may be, have a feathered appearance, and though seldom straight, have been observed to extend 40,000 miles, with a breadth of forty miles. They move in the same direction, and with the same velocity as the spots themselves; and this fact tends strongly to confirm the inference, that the motion and reappearance of the spots indicate a true and determinate rotation of the solar orb in that direction.

Besides a generally uniform passage, at the rate of about 4000 miles per hour across the sun's disk, the spots are observed to have certain proper motions of their own, which at first sight seem to interfere with their general rotary velocity. Mr. Dawes observed a large spot which revolved round its centre in twelve days; and M. Laugier, of Paris, calculated the proper motion of certain irregularly moving spots to be (independently of the high velocity due to the solar rotation already referred to) at the rate of 247 miles per hour. Mr. Carrington attributes such proper motion to the tendency of groups of spots to recede from each other.

Spots also change in shape and

size, and their duration varies from a few days to three or four months. Some appear to start into existence while you examine the solar disk, and others to fade away. Many are formed and then die out within a single transit, which lasts a fortnight. Others reappear during three revolutions of the sun, though seldom oftener.

The manner of the rise and obliteration of sun-spots is curious, and is the basis of Professor Wilson's original hypothesis of their being actual cavities. When one is being formed, the umbra appears before the penumbra; and in evanescence, the nucleus and umbra seem to get filled up irregularly, and crossed by faculous ridges. The penumbra is finally encroached upon by darting masses of incandescent matter, and is replaced by the general brightness of the photosphere.

Concerning the nature of these spots, it is a suggestion as old as Maupertuis, that they are masses of the floating unconsumed scum of the incandescent fluid. Lalande supposed them to be protuberances from the interior, standing out from the solar surface like our rock islands from the sea; but the foreshortening of the nearest edges as they recede towards the sun's eastern limb, disproves this hypothesis; and it is even stated, on good authority, that the great spot of 1719 was seen as a notch on the sun's edge.

The explanation most widely accepted, especially since the time of the elder Herschel, is that they are cavities in the elastic solar atmosphere. This "discovery" is due to Professor Alexander Wilson, of Glasgow, who, in 1774, observed the foreshortening of their nearest edges, and who thence advanced the opinion, that they were holes in the sun's atmosphere, caused by masses of elastic fluid escaping volcanically from the fiery globe underneath, and thus, not only laying bare the sun's surface in the central nucleus, but also,