Newport weekly independent., 1902-11-28
THE STARS BY DAYLIGHT.
Tradition That They May Be Seen from
 Bottom of Shaft

that if an observer places him. self at the bottom of any deep shaft - as of a mine, well, or a factory chimney - which may shut off scattered light and fe- duce the area of sky illumination acting on the retina, he will be able to discern the brighter stars with out difficulty. The tradition is one of respectable antiquity, for Aristotle refers to persons seeing stars in daylight when looking out from caverns of subterranean reservoirs, and Pliny ascribes to deep wells similar power of rendering visible the stars, the light of which would other. wise be lost in the overpowering splendor of the solar rays.
 The tradition, well founded or not, has often been adopted for literary effect. It seems almost sacrilegious to hint thatno star known to astron- omers could have shown down unceas ingly upon poor Stephen Blackpool during his seven days and nights of agony at the bottom of Old Hell shaft; that at the best he could only have caught a glimpse of it for few minutes in each 24 hours as it passed across the zenith. Dickens, indeed, does not absolutely say that Stephen watched the star by day light It is only a natural inference from his description; but kipling adopts the tradition in its eXtremest form when he writes of:
 ''rhe gorge that shows the stars at noon-
 day clear.'
 But is the tradition true? Of course, says Knowledge, every one knows that Venus from time to time may be seen even at high noon; but then Venus at her brightest is many times over brighter than Sirius. Then, again, the assistance of telescope enables the brighter stars to be dis cerned at midday; but the telescope not only directs the eye and greatly limits the area from which the ky- light reaches the observer, but it enormously increases the brightness of the star relative to that sky illu- imitation. The naked eye obServa- tion of true stars in full sunlight stands in quite a different category.
 Humboldt, who was much inter- ested in the question, repeatedly tried the experiment, both in Si- beria and in America, and not only failed himself ever to detect a star, but never came across anyone who had succeeded Much more recently an American astronomer set up a tube for the express purpose of sec ing the Pleiades by daylight, also with no effect. It has been supposed that Flamsteed, the first astronomer royal, sank we'll at Glenwich observ- atory for the purpose of observing Gamma Draconis, the zenith star of Greenwich in this manner.
 The existence of the we'll is un- doubted, though Sir George Airy, the late astronomer royal, was unable to find it, but Flamsteed marks it on more than one of his plans of the ob- servatory, and there is drawing ex- tant of the we'll itself, showing the spiral staircase that ran down 1t. But its purpose seems to have been, not to have furnished the means of ob- serving the star with the naked eye, but to enable the observer to measure as accurately as possible the distance of the star from the true zenith at the moment of transit.
 Sir John Herschel mentions a case, which he considers as satisfactory ev- idence, of an optician who stated that the earliest circumstance that drew his attention to astronomy ''was the regular appearance at a certain hour for several successive days, of a con- siderable star through the shaft of a chimney" This, it will be noticed, is secondhand evidence. l have never been able to obtain evidence even so direct as this myself, though have met several persons who felt quite confident that they had seen stars by daylight on looking up the shaft of a mine, or that some one had told thnn he had dnnn so 9