On the Conservation of Solar Energy

Abstract

UNDER this title Dr. C. W. Siemens, on March 2, presented to the Royal Society a paper, which is published in NATURE, vol. xxv. p. 440. Therein, after noticing the hypotheses proposed by Meyer, Helmholtz, and Sir William Thomson, to explain the maintenance of solar heat, he endeavours to show how the energy apparently lost by radiation from the sun into space, may be gathered up and restored to the centre of our system. This he conceives to be effected through the intervention of attenuated matter diffused throughout space, which is the recipient of the radiated energy, and is continuously absorbed and again reflected by the centrifugal action of the sun itself. The matter diffused through space he supposes to include oxygen and nitrogen, hydrogen, aqueous vapour, and carbon compounds, besides solid materials which are probably exhalations from the sun, and constitute the so-called cosmic dust.¹