When this discovery was effected, men made the most important and, I think, the most satisfactory step towards the determination of cyclic associations between solar and terrestrial phenomena. It is for that reason that I refer specially to the point. In reality, it does not appertain to my subject, for seasons and sun-spots are not associated. But it admirably illustrates the value of cyclic relations. Men might have gone on for centuries, we may conceive, noting the recurrence of seed-time and harvest-time, summer and winter, recognizing the periodical returns of heat and cold, and (in some regions) of dry seasons and wet seasons, of calm and storm, and so forth, without perceiving that the sun runs through his changes of diurnal motion in the same cyclic period. We can imagine that some few who might notice the connection between the two orders of celestial phenomena would be anxious to spread their faith in the association among their less observant brethren. They might maintain that observatories for watching the motions of the sun would demonstrate either that their belief was just or that it was not so, would in fact dispose finally of the question. It is giving the most advantageous possible position to those who now advocate the erection of solar observatories for determining what connection, if any, may exist between sun-spots and terrestrial phenomena, thus to compare them to observers who had noted a relation which unquestionably exists. But it is worthy of notice that if those whom I have imagined thus urging the erection of an observatory for solving the question whether the sun rules the seasons, and to some degree regulates the recurrence of dry or rainy, and of calm or stormy weather, had promised results of material value from their observations, they would have promised more than they could possibly have performed. Even in this most favourable case, where the sun is, beyond all question, the efficient ruling body, where the nature of the cyclic change is most exactly determinable, and where even the way in which the sun acts can be exactly ascertained, no direct benefit accrues from the knowledge. The exact determination of the sun’s apparent motions has its value, and this value is great, but it is most certainly not derived from any power of predicting the recurrence of those phenomena which nevertheless depend directly on the sun’s action. The farmer who in any given year knows from the almanac the exact duration of daylight, and the exact mid-day elevation of the sun for every day in the year, is not one whit better able to protect his crops or his herds against storm or flood than the tiller of the soil or the tender of flocks a hundred thousand years or so ago, who knew only when seed-time and summer and harvest-time and winter were at hand or in progress.