Other
Scientific paper
Nov 1881
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1881natur..25...30s&link_type=abstract
Nature, Volume 25, Issue 628, pp. 30 (1881).
Other
Scientific paper
THE subject of these lectures (NATURE, vol. xxiv. pp. 593, 613) related primarily to the sun, and I was concerned with certain magnetic or electrical phenomena which are observed at the earth's surface only in so far as they related to the elucidation of the physics of the sun. Accordingly these collateral subjects were treated only very briefly, and I did not attempt to give anything like a history of the discoveries which have been made in them, even as regards the portions which bear more immediately on the physics of the sun. Indeed in many cases I designedly refrained from mentioning names, lest the hearers should suppose that I was giving a history of the subject, and those whose names might not appear in the very imperfect notice which it would have been should feel aggrieved. When a phenomenon was well known I generally contented myself with referring to it as such. Thus, for example, in alluding to earth-currents I spoke of them as what the progress of telegraphy had made us ``familiarly acquainted with'' I said nothing about their discovery by Mr. Barlow, as described in his important paper published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1849, though it was a paper I had studied in connection with the lectures. I hope this example may suffice to prevent any one whose name does not appear from feeling annoyed at the omission, and to prevent the readers of NATURE from taking my lectures for what they were not intended to be, namely, a complete history of the subject. I take this opportunity of referring to one passage in my second lecture (NATURE, p. 415, a little above the figure), where 1 say ``we might not have tension enough to produce such a discharge [i.e. a flash of lightning], the resistance to the passage of electricity from one portion of the air to another, which at any rate would be comparatively dry compared with what we have in warm latitudes, would prevent it by itself alone.'' These words, without actually asserting, seem to imply that the resistance to such a discharge through moist air would be less than through dry. My attention has been called by a friend to the fact that it has been found by experiment that moist air insulates as well as dry. I have not met with experiments tending to show whether the resistance to a disruptive discharge is the same or not in the two. Be that as t may, it does not affect what follows; for we know as a fact that thunderstorms are absent in high latitudes.
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