A triple phenomenon, it consists, when completely seen, of a cone, a band, and a counterglow. The connection of these parts into a whole is obvious, though enigmatical. Usually, however, only the cone is visible. It appears about the time of the spring and autumn equinoxes, after sunset and before sunrise respectively, as a faint lenticular illumination, tapering upward from the sun's place below the horizon to an apex high up near the meridian. Under the name of the 'False Dawn' it was familiar, probably from an early age, to Oriental peoples. But they looked for it at the opposite end of the night from that favoured by European observers; nor did the phenomenon attract any particular notice here in England until 1660, when Joshua Childrey published a description of it in his _Britannia Baconica_. Yet it had been specifically observed about seventy years previously by Christoph Rothmann of Hesse, and must have been less intelligently perceived by numberless spectators, who most likely included it, with such miscellaneous objects as comets' tails, auroral beams, and meteor-trails, in the undefined class of appearances known from of old as _trabes_. The light is ordinarily much feebler than the Milky Way, which it nevertheless on occasions unmistakably outshines.[111] Real fluctuations of brightness seem implicated in these changes; yet they follow no traceable law of periodicity, and are certainly independent of the sunspot cycle. The counterglow, first remarked by Pezénas in 1730,[112] soon fell into oblivion, and had to be rediscovered after six-score years by Brorsen, who bestowed upon it its current title of the 'Gegenschein.' Of late it has been pretty constantly observed, particularly by Professor Barnard, to whom it presented itself, owing to the scantiness of the available records, as a surprising novelty.[113] Surprising it certainly is. The appearance of the Gegenschein is that of a large elliptical patch of diffuse light, measuring about 12 by 9 degrees, and situated diametrically opposite to the sun.[114] Now and again, though somewhat rarely, it is perceived to be united to the cone by the 'zodiacal band,' a strip of evanescent luminosity nearly following the line of the ecliptic. We cannot, then, be mistaken in recognising the great pyramidal beam centred on the sun, with the counterglow and its linking band, as sections of a single formation, constituting in a manner the substratum of the solar system. A recent observation made by Professor Newcomb under unique conditions proves it to be much less exclusively 'zodiacal' than had been supposed. Looking north from the summit of the Rothhorn, at midnight, on July 29, 1905, he perceived a well-marked glow spreading 35 degrees from the sun's place.[115] It was the light in its thwartwise aspect, which had never before been seen, or even looked for; and we learn from it the remarkable fact that the sun is enclosed in a vast, dimly luminous sphere, with a girth not much