If the "volcanic hypothesis" represented the truth, no spot could possibly appear without a precedent eruption. The real order of the phenomenon, however, is exceedingly difficult to ascertain; nor is it perhaps invariable. Although, in most cases, the "opening" shows first, that may be simply because it is more easily seen. According to Father Sidgreaves,[469] the disturbance has then already passed the incipient stage. He considers it indeed "highly probable that the preparatory sign of a new spot is always a small, bright patch of facula." This sequence, if established, would be fatal to Lockyer's theory of sun-spots, communicated to the Royal Society, May 6, 1886,[470] and further developed some months later in his work on _The Chemistry of the Sun_. Spots are represented in it as incidental to a vast system of solar atmospheric circulation, starting with the polar out- and up-flows indicated by observations during some total eclipses, and eventuating in the plunge downward from great heights upon the photosphere of prodigious masses of condensed materials. From these falls result, primarily, spots; secondarily, through the answering uprushes in which chemical and mechanical forces co-operate, their girdles of flame-prominences. The evidence is, however, slight that such a circulatory flow as would be needed to maintain this supposed cycle of occurrences really prevails in the sun's atmosphere; and a similar objection applies to an "anticyclonic theory" (so to designate it) elaborated by Egon von Oppolzer in 1893.[471] August Schmidt's optical rationale of solar phenomena[472] was, on the other hand, a complete novelty, both in principle and development. Attractive to speculators from its recondite nature and far-reaching scope, it by no means commended itself to practical observers, intolerant of finding the all but palpable realities of their daily experience dealt with as illusory products of "circular refraction."