evidence goes, however, we have the theory presented as, on the whole, more probable, that the matter of which the corona consists is, in large part, incandescent through intensity of heat. It is difficult to suppose that such skilful observers as have studied the coronal spectrum would have failed to detect dark lines, had any existed. On the other hand, we have à priori reasons for believing that the matter of the corona, or at least of that part which has been analyzed with the spectroscope, must be intensely heated. A portion of the corona which appears to lie but eight minutes from the sun's edge, must lie in reality so close to his orb that the sun, instead of appearing as a disc but about half a degree in width, would seem nearly ninety degrees wide, and the amount of heat received from him would be many thousand times greater than that received on the hottest day of a tropical summer. We can form an opinion of the effect of such heat as this, in the same way that Sir John Herschel estimated the heat received by the great comet of 1843, when nearest to the sun. "To form some practical idea of this," he writes, "we may compare it with what is recorded of Parker's great lens, whose diameter was 32 inches, and focal length 6 feet 8 inches. The effect of this, supposing all the light and heat transmitted, and the focal concentration perfect (both conditions being very imperfectly satisfied), would be to enlarge the sun's effective angular diameter to about 23 degrees." This, he shows, would give a heat 1,915 times greater than that received by the earth, "and when increased seven-fold, as was usually the case, would give 13,400 times" the heat received by the earth. The heat received by the matter of the corona would be fully twice as great as this; "yet," says Sir John, "the lens, so used, melted cornelian, agate, and rock crystal."

And here a somewhat curious subject presents itself for consideration-a subject which has not hitherto, so far as we know, been very carefully attended to. It may seem that material so diffused and tenuous as that of the corona would be altogether invisible, however intensely heated and illuminated. For, beyond question, the actual quantity of matter in the corona must be indefinitely small by comparison with the space which this object fills.

It

may be doubted, indeed, whether all the matter in a portion of the corona as large as our earth might not be outweighed by half-a-dozen peppercorns.

But so far as the visibility of the corona is concerned, the extremely fine division to which its material substance is almost certainly subject, would tend to compensate for the quantitative minuteness of that material. A very simple illustration will explain our meaning. This earth of ours reflects a certain amount of sunlight towards the inner planets, Venus and Mercury. Now suppose the earth were divided into eight equal parts, and each fashioned into a globe. The eight globes would each have a diameter half the earth's present diameter, and each would reflect one-fourth of the light which the earth now reflects. The eight then would reflect altogether twice as much light as the earth actually reflects; and yet their combined bulk would only equal hers. If each of these eight globes were divided into eight others, four times as much light would be reflected as the earth now reflects. And if the division were continued until the several globes were reduced to mere grains, and these grains were well spread out, the quantity of sunlight which the cloud of grains would intercept and reflect towards the interior planets would exceed many millionfold that which the earth actually reflects. In like manner,

an incandescent globe, if divided into myriads of minute incandescent globes, would supply much more light than in its original condition.

So in the case of the coronal matter. Assuming it to consist of myriads of indefinitely minute particles, very widely dispersed, it would be capable of emitting and reflecting a quantity of light altogether disproportioned to its actual weight regarding it as a whole.

But when we consider the spectrum of bright lines given by the corona, the case no longer remains altogether so simple. One cannot very readily accept the opinion of Professor Harkness, that this portion of the coronal light comes from iron existing in the state of vapor; for, although it is exceedingly probable that iron forms one of the chief constituents of the coronal substance, yet, in the first place, we have no reason for believing that a degree of heat intense enough to vaporize iron. would exist where we see the corona; and,

in the second, other elements must also be present in the coronal substance, and they also would be vaporized, whereas we find none of the lines due to other known elements.

The idea suggested by Professor Young and others seems more likely to be the correct explanation of the matter. For bizarre and fanciful as the idea may seem that the corona is a perpetual solar aurora, it must not be forgotten that General Sabine and Dr. Stewart propounded, some years since, in explanation of known terrestrial phenomena, the theory that the colored prominences are solar auroras. This idea has been shown, indeed, to be erroneous, but the reasoning on which it was based was sufficiently sound, and the observed facts would be equally well explained by supposing the corona, instead of the prominences, to form a perpetual solar aurora.

When we remember that the zodiacal light-a phenomenon which holds a position midway between the terrestrial aurora and the solar corona-has been shown to give a spectrum closely resembling both the auroral and the coronal spectra, the idea does certainly seem encouraged that all three phenomena are intimately associated. We might thus not unreasonably regard the zodiacal light as the outer and very much fainter part of the corona, the two together forming a perpetual solar aurora; and in this way we should begin to see the means of explaining the remarkable but undoubted fact that the displays of our terrestrial auroras are associated in a most intimate manner with the condition of the solar surface. For we should be led to regard the recurrence of our auroras as a manifestation of the same sort of solar action which is more constantly at work amidst the materials constituting the corona and the zodiacal light.

This view leaves unexplained the bright lines of the coronal spectrum. But as we have every reason for regarding the auroral light as an electrical phenomenon, and the bright lines in the auroral spectrum as, therefore, not due to the presence of vast quantities of glowing vapor, we may extend the same interpretation to the coronal spectrum. In laboratory experiments, when the electric spark passes between

two iron points, its spectrum shows the lines belonging to vaporized iron, and yet the quantity of iron vaporized by the spark is almost infinitesimally minute. And similarly, if we regard the corona as an electrical phenomenon, we get over the difficulty which opposes itself to Professor Harkness' theory, that a large proportion of the corona consists of the luminous vapor of iron.

The general result would seem confirmatory of these views, according to which the real origin of the coronal light is to be sought in the millions of meteor systems which undoubtedly circle round the sun, many of them passing (when in perihelion) very close to his globe. These meteor-systems have been shown to be associated with comets, though, as yet, the exact nature of the association is little understood. From what we have learned respecting them, we should expect the sun during eclipse to be surrounded as with a crown of glory or light, due to the illumination of the mixed cometic and meteoric matter. We should also, for like reason, expect to find a faint glow along that very region of the heavens where the zodiacal light is seen. When we add to these considerations, the circumstance that all other theories of the corona and zodiacal light appear to be disposed of by the evidence at present in our hands, it would certainly seem that we have fair reason for regarding the interpretation here set forth as at least, in the main, the true one. Many details may yet remain to be considered; many peculiarities, both of the corona and of meteoric systems, may remain to be ascertained; and, fortunately, the means are not wanting for fruitful research into both subjects. But this general view seems demonstrated, that the facts recently ascertained by astronomers respecting meteoric systems on the one hand, and the corona on the other, are closely related together. It is highly probable, also, that the association between the two orders of facts will become more and more clearly apparent with the further progress of observation, and of that careful analysis of observation which alone educes its true value.

THE Venerable Burton of the Anatomy of Melancholy, observes somewhere, that, as we look curiously at the sun during an eclipse, though indifferent to him at ordinary times, so we follow with interest a great man in his periods of struggle and adversity. What is true of men in this saying is also true of nations; and of no nation so true as of Spain, which has probably been more closely watched during the last two years than during the whole interval between the civil war which placed Isabella on the throne, and the revolution which drove her from it for ever. Indeed, we doubt if there is any country between the interest of whose associations and the interest of its political condition the European world draws such a line of distinction. Italy is certainly not inferior to Spain in the charm which belongs to memories and relics of the past; but Italy has always had keen admirers of, and sympathizers with, her modern political movements: while not one Englishman in a hundred knows against whom Riego rose, or how the principles of Narvaez differed from those of O'Donnell. Among the other misfortunes of the Peninsula must be counted the vulgar impression that its only business is to be picturesque, to be a land of Moorish palaces and Gothic cathedrals, aqueducts with broken arches, and lonely crosses marking the spot of deeds of blood; a land of orange-trees, fountains, and guitars, strings of mules and processions of priests, hidalgos of stately manners, and dark-eyed women, covering with mantillas their long black masses of hair. We believe that a cockney tourist is seriously annoyed when he finds a Spanish lady dressed like his own sister, or when a Spanish gentleman asks him in very fair English a variety of sensible questions about the use of esparto in the papermanufacture, and the effect of Mr. Gladstone's bill upon land-tenure in Ireland. Yet the real spirit at work beneath all these Spanish revolutions, including the last and greatest, and in spite of the element of military and factious intrigue which plays so great a part in them, is a vague discontent with that old life, of which only "picturesque" rags are left,

and a keen longing to take a worthy share in the new work of Europe, which we must all do, whether we like it or not. Spain, in fact, though not very willing to say so openly, is ashamed of her backwardness, and sick of her comparative isolation. Her best men desire that the Pyrenees shall exist no longer, though in a very different sense from that of the famous saying of Louis. They wish to share in the civilized prosperity and practical command of nature of other nations, and would be content even if their country lost some of its "romantic" charms in the process, if its Don Quixotes were put under friendly restraint, and its Murillo's "Beggar Boys" were sent to a raggedschool. Besides, when all is said and done, what is the worth of the kind of "picturesqueness" that co-exists with decadence, laziness, and corruption? The liberal and beautiful arts themselves, by which the feeling of romance is kept alive, flourish with the activity and decline with the decay of the other powers of a nation. Spain has sunk low; but she has not sunk so low as to be content to be a mere "model," to make a career of sitting for her portrait to ingenious gentlemen from countries where painting prospers with the general prosperity of the rest of the national life.

Whether Spain is really to revive, as the best Spaniards hope, by a genial contact with other nations, is surely a question of much interest to Europe, and one which can only be forwarded, if affected at all, by a frank unprejudiced criticism of her actual condition. The isolation of the country just referred to is no new fact in her history, but, on the contrary, one of the most ancient as well as significant of all facts about her. She was late in entering into the European system, either the ancient or the modern; and she has always become powerful or prominent less by her own impulse than by the effect of an impulse from some other nation without.

Homer knew nothing of Spain, and Herodotus only very little, through the Phoenician traders, who first annexed her to civilization, from that African side of the Mediterranean which has had such an influence over her character and fortunes.

The Phoenicians-colonists as well as traders-found, in the Iberians, a numerous and distinct race, the affinities of which to the other races of Europe cannot be shown, but who certainly had many and strong points of likeness to the Spaniards of the present day. Here we have the first cause of the strongly-marked individuality of the Spaniard a distinctness of race separating him from the other families of Europe, whose cousinship, in one degree or another, can be satisfactorily proved. We know the Celt, and can recognize in him, with Prichard, the man of Indo-European relationship with Michelet, the ancestor of the modern Frenchman. We know the German, and his English kindred, and their unmistakable family likeness to the Germans of Tacitus. But who was the Iberian-he who began, as Polybius tells us, at the Pyrenees? He was not a Celt, though in a certain portion of Spain he had coalesced with him, under a name-Celtiberian-assumed expressly to mark the union of two separate stocks. He was quite distinct from the Phoenician, who had, however, settlements of some extent in what is now Andalusia. He had nothing in common with the Greek, who had planted himself on a point or two of the eastern coast, after, and in imitation of, the celebrated foundation of Marseilles. It is said that the Iberian inscriptions are to be explained by the Basque language; but philologists are not agreed about the Basque itself, to which some assign a Tartar origin. Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, the only man, in Niebuhr's opinion, "who could throw any light upon the subject," held that the Basque was once universally spoken throughout Spain, and its difficulty and obscurity are additional proofs of the separate individuality of the Iberian type.

The Greek and Latin writers may be searched in vain for any satisfactory account of the origin or immigration of the Iberians. But we may gather from those writers many instructive details as to the national character and habits. They were divided into numerous tribes, which could seldom be got to unite together, even against foreigners, whom they all agreed in hating. They were hardy, fierce, frugal, and furiously brave, especially under excitement, and when defending their towns; but not good in the open

field, and in regular war, unless when led by quite exceptional generals. They had passionate confidence in individual chiefs, and were naturally fond of party and faction, with a constant tendency to waver, either from temper or from interest. They were greedy for money, and apt to sell their trust; coarsely cruel in their light estimate of human life, and prone to assassination. The betrayal of hostages, the surrender of towns, the desertion of allies, the murder of men like Hasdrubal, Viriathus, Sertorius,-these are all characteristic traits of Iberian history. There was a certain hardness and ferocity about the durus Iber,—the truces Iberi,—which seems to have impressed itself as the predominant feature of the race, on the classical mind.

When Cato the Censor disarmed the tribes near the Ebro, many of them killed themselves rather than survive the loss of their weapons. At the siege of Numantia, they ate each other when provisions ran short, and slaughtered each other when surrender became inevitable. Long after the Romans had occupied nearly the whole Peninsula, when the south of France was as civilized as Italy, and Marseilles had its schools of philosophy and rhetoric, the mass of the Iberians were evidently in a barbarous state. Catullus's account of the queer Celtiberian substitute for tooth-powder (Carm. 37, 38) might appear a joke, if it did not receive confirmation from Strabo (Geog. 3, 4). But, however important as a military station, and a field of action in the civil wars, Spain seems hardly to have been adopted into the classical life of Italy during the most brilliant period. Horace couples Ilerda (the modern Lerida), one of the towns nearest the Pyrenees, with Utica, as among the last places his book is likely to reach, after being worn out or abandoned to the moths in the capital. Το Juvenal, Spain is horrida Hispania. The Roman civilization was spreading itself, all this time, of course; new cities were being founded; noble roads made, and aqueducts built. But, except on the Mediterranean coast, civilization came slowly, and late. Nor has Spain ever been a storehouse of good classical art, or valuable ancient MSS., considering how conveniently she lies towards Italy, and how early and extensive was her Mediterranean commerce. Her importance in ancient history is political and mili

tary, and due to her geographical position rather than to the gifts or qualities of her indigenous inhabitants. We do not forget her wits of the Empire, such as the pungent Martial, who has devoted some charming verses to his birth-place, and the neighboring regions-the modern Arragon and Catalonia. But nobody, we fancy, supposes that Martial was an Iberian, any more than Terence was an Ethiopian. The Roman legions became denizens of the Peninsula, and diffused over it plenty of Roman and Italian blood, while gradually preparing it, also, for that form of Latin speech which in after ages found its highest expression in the dialect of Castile.

The Phoenicians and Romans may be said to have, between them, created Spain. The Phoenicians developed the wealth of the wonderful southern regions, which Strabo considered the richest part of the habitable world. Land and sea were alike lavish of the necessaries and luxuries of life. Wine, grain, oil, wax, honey, pitch, coccus, minium, were exported in great quantities from the banks of the Bætis and the harbor of Cadiz-with oysters, and shell-fish, and lampreys, and the murex famous for its purple dye all of which were poured in great quantities into the markets of Syria, and, later, of Rome. Gold and silver, brass and iron, came from the same favored shores. For a time it seemed that Spain would be African rather than European; and one of the greatest men of antiquity-Hamilcar, the father of Hannibal-formed a profound scheme for uniting her to the chief of all the Phoenician colonies, by enlisting her sons under the banner of Carthage, and building upon the most venerable commerce what might be the most formidable polity of the Mediterranean. Spain, according to this project, was, as Polybius shows, to have been made a means not only of securing Carthage, but of attacking Rome. The disasters of the first Punic War were to be avenged, and the loss of Sicily and Sardinia more than compensated. The genius and the designs of Hamilcar descended to his son Hannibal, and the second Punic War was their natural result. But the second Punic War had precisely the opposite effect to that intended by the great man who meditated it and the great man who executed it. The Carthaginian power in

the Peninsula was destroyed, although— what is well worth noting-the Iberians seem to have taken quite as kindly to the Carthaginians as to the Romans. And in the two centuries which elapsed between the victories of the Scipios and the victories of Augustus, Rome gradually established her authority from the Pyrenees to the sea. The towns which she founded, or re-founded, in different parts of the country-the modern Badajoz, Merida, Zaragoza, Pampeluna, for example-became centres of Romanization, that is, of civilization. Roman colonies were planted thickly over the land. Brigandage, which the Iberian always much affected, was checked. In the wilder parts, the people might still eat bread made from acorns, and sleep upon the ground on straw. But with order and good roads, came traffic and tranquillity. Iberia was never Italy, but neither was it the Iberia of the Scipios. The Gothic conquerors found it so essentially modified by Roman institutions and Roman teaching, that their great bishops, the men of the councils of Toledo, rose superior in legislative wisdom to the men who elsewhere dictated the policy of the barbarians, and prepared the bases of the new European civilization.

"Open the Law of the Visigoths," says M. Guizot: "it is not a barbarous law; evidently it is redacted by the philosophers of the time, by the clergy. It abounds in general ideas, in theories, and in theories plainly foreign to barbarous manners

The Visigothic law bears throughout a learned, systematic, social character. One sees there the work of the same clergy which prevailed in the councils of Toledo, and so powerfully influenced the government of the country. In Spain, and up to the great invasion of the Arabs, it was the theocratic principle which tried to restore civilization.

This "theocratic principle" singled out by M. Guizot as the governing fact in the formation of modern, as distinct from classical Spain, has assumed strange shapes and led to curious issues in that country. Little is known of the old religion of the Iberians, though we are told by Strabo (lib. 3, 4) that the central and northern tribes used to worship a certain nameless god by dancing in his. honor with their families at night, at the time of full moon. But, great as were the: