836 POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY. 



particularly in tlie study of solar physics. " His first communi- 

 cation to the Royal Astronomical Society," says Nature, upon 

 whose obituary notice of Father Perry we rely for most of our 

 material, " indicates the policy he pursued to undertake no work 

 which was a mere duplication of that done at other places." It 

 appears, from a summary of his solar work during the ten preced- 

 ing years, given at a lecture at the Royal Institution in May, 1889, 

 that it was carried on by means of drawings and spectroscopic 

 observations. " For the drawings an image of the sun ten inches 

 and a half in diameter was projected on a sheet of drawing-paper 

 affixed to a sketch board carried by the telescope, and all mark- 

 ings on the sun traced. The drawing finished, the chromosphere 

 and prominences were examined with the spectroscope. About 

 two hundred and fifty drawings were made every year from 1880. 

 The results of these observations were published annually in a 

 neat little volume, and in various publications." Regular ob- 

 servations of Jupiter's satellites and of comets were also made, 

 and spectroscopic observations of comets and stars. In the 

 year 1888, for instance, the chromosphere was completely exam- 

 ined on eighty-four days and partly on three other days. The 

 Rev. Aloysius L. Cortie, S. J., in his biography of Father Perry 

 (London, Catholic Truth Society), describes the work at Stony- 

 hurst as having included the daily drawing of the sun when pos- 

 sible, the measurement of the depth of the chromosphere, the 

 heights of prominences, and observations of sun-spot spectra a 

 programme which was faithfully adhered to up to the time of 

 Father Perry's death. The drawings of the sun spots, as they ap- 

 peared in the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society, repro- 

 ductions of two of which are given in Father Cortie's book, show 

 how much can be effected by means of the pencil. The main ob- 

 ject of making these drawings, which are of great importance 

 and supplement the solar photographs, was to throw light upon 

 the theories of the mode of formation of spots, and to find, if pos- 

 sible, the clew to the connection between terrestrial magnetism 

 and solar activity. 



Father Perry's industry and strict attention to his work of 

 observation are further attested in his contributions to Nature 

 and other journals. In Nature, the only journal of which we 

 have complete files at hand, we find from one to three communi- 

 cations each in twenty-three of the forty volumes which were 

 published previous to his death, recording phenomena of weather, 

 magnetism, the aurora borealis, meteors, the sun, and earthquakes. 

 The first volume, for instance, has a communication describing 

 the cyclone of January 13, 1870, as it prevailed at Stonyhurst. In 

 the third volume are letters speaking of his having missed on 

 some observation a particular faint yellow line in the chromo- 



