Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1878 — The Snn Made of Metal. [ARTICLE]

The Snn Made of Metal.

In a recent article in the Nineteenth Century , by Mr. J. Norman Lockyer, the writer very strongly objects to Dr. Draper’s discovery of oxygen in the sun. Mr. Lockyer says he has gone carefully over the whole ground and finds: First, that the photograph on which Dr. Draper bases the discovery is not one competent to settle such an important question; second, that he does not find the coincidences between bright solar lines and oxygen lines in the part of the spectram with which he is most familiar; and, third, that comparing Dr. Draper’s photograph with the fine photograph of the spectrum obtained by Mr. Rutherford he “fails to find any true bright line in the sun whatever coincident with any line of oxygen whatever.” Mr. Lockyer sums up the evidence as to the sun’s composition in these words: “So far as our unoontested knowledge goes, the sun is chiefly made of metal, and on this account is strangely different from the crust of our earth, in which the metals are in large minority.