to the inner cloud-layer rendered luminous by light from above.
"The sun viewed in this light appears to be nothing else than a very eminent, large, and lucid planet, evidently the first or, in strictness of speaking, the only primary one of our system; . . . it is most probably also inhabited, like the rest of the planets, by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe."
That spots were depressions had been suggested more than twenty years before (1774) by Alexander Wilson of Glasgow (1714–1786), and supported by evidence different from any adduced by Herschel and in some ways more conclusive. Wilson noticed, first in the case of a large spot seen in 1769, and afterwards in other cases, that as the sun's rotation carries a spot across its disc from one edge to another, its appearance changes exactly as it would do in accordance with ordinary laws of perspective if the spot were a saucer-shaped depression, of which the bottom formed the umbra and the sloping sides the penumbra, since the penumbra appears narrowest on the side nearest the centre of the sun and widest on the side nearest the edge. Hence Wilson inferred, like Herschel, but with less confidence, that the body of the sun is dark. In the paper referred to Herschel shews no signs of being acquainted with Wilson's work, but in a second paper (1801), which contained also a valuable series of observations of the detailed markings on the solar surface, he refers to Wilson's "geometrical proof" of the depression of the umbra of a spot.
Although it is easy to see now that Herschel's theory was a rash generalisation from slight data, it nevertheless explained—with fair success—most of the observations made up to that time.
Modern knowledge of heat, which was not accessible to Herschel, shews us the fundamental impossibility of the continued existence of a body with a cold interior and merely a shallow ring of hot and luminous material round it; and the theory in this form is therefore purely of historic interest (cf. also chapter xiii., §§ 298, 303).
269. Another suggestive idea of Herschel's was the analogy between the sun and a variable star, the known
