NOTES BY THE EDITOR. XVII 



until near evening, after a heavy storm of wind and rain. During 

 the totality, one good photograph of the corona was obtained with 

 the 6-inch glass, with an exposure of 1 minutes. It is, of course, 

 by no means so good as it would have been had the sky been 

 truly clear ; but it shows a great deal of detail, curved filaments 

 and radial shadings far better than ever before obtained. The 

 picture produced with the 8-inch glass was injured by not being 

 removed until the sun came out. No attempts were made to pho- 

 tograph the prominences, which can be seen and studied at any 

 time. All efforts were concentrated on the corona. 



"In respect to the polarization observations, there is reason to 

 suppose that there must have been some peculiar defect in the 

 particular instrument Professor Pickering used last year, as his 

 assistant, Mr. Ross, using it on this occasion, obtained the same 

 unsatisfactory result. But apparently similar instruments, used 

 this year, together with others quite different in construction, in- 

 dicated radial polarization of the corona. The appearances in the 

 instruments were much complicated by the cloud and haze, but 

 I believe Professor Pickering and Professor Lang-ley both a-oree 



O / o 



that the corona certainly has a considerable proportion of its light 

 radially polarized. Our spectroscopic results completely confirm 

 those of last year, and except that the two faint lines which I saw 

 between D and E last year, and suspected to be corona lines as 

 well as 1474, were not seen at all this time ; 1474 was traced by 

 Professor Winlock to a distance of nearly 20 minutes from the 

 sun's limb. I traced it 16 minutes on the west, 12 on the north, 

 14 on the east, and about 10 on the. south. The principal chro- 

 mosphere lines were also visible in the corona to a distance of 3 or 

 4 minutes. Professor Winlock and myself both agree in attribu- 

 ting this to the reflection of the haze around the sun. I am more 

 confident as to this, because last year, in a clear atmosphere, the 

 C line was certainly sharply terminated at the upper limit of the 

 chromosphere or prominences under observation. Mr. Abbay, in 

 his spectroscope, saw only the 1474 line and the F line, the 

 former was considerably the brighter of the two. He saw no con- 

 tinuous spectrum. 



" But the most interesting spectroscopic observation of the 

 eclipse appears to me to be the ascertaining at the base of the 

 chromosphere, and, of course, in immediate contact with the 

 photosphere, of a thin layer in whose spectrum the dark lines of 

 the ordinary solar spectrum are all reversed. Just previous to 

 totality I had carefully adjusted the slit tangential to the sun's 



