north; but here, nearer the coast, I think we are still better off. "Mr. Maclaren holds out the prospect of our meeting you at Pachley at no distant period, and I hope you will find your way ere long to Collingwood. I have no instruments or astronomical apparatus to show you, but a remarkably pretty country, which is beginning to put on (rather late) its gala dress of spring?'

Sir John afterwards requested my permission to insert in his Outlines of Astronomy, of which a new edition was about to appear, a representation of "the willow-leaved structure of the Sun's surface," -- which had been published in the Manchester transactions, -- to which I gladly gave my assent. Sir John thus expresses himself on the subject: -"The curious appearance of the 'pores' of the Sun's surface has lately received a most singular and unexpected interpretation from the remarkable discovery of Mr. J. Nasmyth, who, from a series of observations made with a reflecting telescope of his own construction under very high magnifying powers, and under exceptional circumstances of tranquillity and definition, has come to the conclusion that these pores are the polygonal interstices between certain luminous objects of an exceedingly definite shape and general uniformity of size, whose form (at least as seen in projection in the central portions of the disc) is that of the oblong leaves of a willow tree. These cover the whole disc of the Sun (except in the space occupied by spots) in countless millions, and lie crossing each other in every imaginable direction. . . . This most astonishing revelation has been confirmed to a certain considerable extent, and with some modifications as to the form of the objects, their exact uniformity of size and resemblance of figure, by Messrs. De la Rue, Pritchard and Stone in England, and M. Secchi in Rome."

On the 25th of February 1864, I received a communication from Mr. E. J. Stone, first assistant at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

The Astronomer-Royal, he said, "has placed in my hands your letter of February 20. Your discovery of the 'willow leaves' on the Solar photosphere having been brought forward at one of the late meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society, my attention was attracted to the subject. At my request, the Astronomer- Royal ordered of Mr. J. Simms a reflecting eye-piece for our great equatorial. The eye-piece was completed about the end of January last, and at the first good opportunity I turned the telescope on the Sun.

"I may state that my impression was, and it appears to have been the impression of several of the assistants here, that the willow leaves stand out dark against the luminous photosphere. On looking at the Sun, I was at once struck with the apparent resolvability of its mottled appearance. The whole disc of the Sun, so far as I examined it, appeared to be covered over with relatively bright rice-like particles, and the mottled appearance seemed to be produced by the interlacing of these particles.

"I could not observe any particular arrangement of the particles, but they appeared to be more numerous in some parts than in others. I have used the word 'rice-like' merely to convey a rough impression of their form. I have seen them on two occasions since, but not so well as on the first day, when the definition was exceedingly good.

"on the first day that I saw them I called Mr Dunkin's attention to them. He appears to have seen them. He says, however, that he should not have noticed them if his attention had not been called to them."

The Astronomer Royal, in his report to the Admiralty on my discovery, said :

"an examination of the Sun's surface with the South-East Equatorial, under favourable circumstances, has convinced me of the accuracy of the description, which compares it with interlacing willow leaves or rice grains."

In March 1864 I received a letter from my friend De la Rue, dated from his observatory at Cranford, Middlesex, in which he said : "I like good honest doubting. Before I had seen with my own eyes your willow leaves, I doubted their real existence, but I did not doubt your having seen what you had drawn. But when I actually saw them for the first time, I could not restrain the exclamation, ' Why, here are Nasmyth's willow leaves!' It requires a very fine state of the atmosphere to permit of their being seen, as I have