THE AURORA BOREALIS

This is usually seen in northern climes, and the reason for this is now clear. We know that the corpuscles discharged from a Crookes tube are deflected by a magnet. These corpuscles are discharged in immense numbers by the sun, and rain upon our earth. Now, the earth is a magnet, and these corpuscles are caught by the lines of force girdling our earth, and carried towards the poles, where they find themselves in an atmosphere comparable with high vacua. They then begin to give out the shifting and darting lights characteristic of the cathode rays, causing a certain luminosity. These darting and shifting lights would, on this theory, account for the Aurora Borealis—which is also known to vary with the number of sun-spots.