384 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



Prof. Smyth, in the Edinburgh Phil. Magazine, states that the eclipse 

 seems to have been, on the whole, very fully observed, the vreather 

 being clear and the definition good at a great number of the stations. 

 The various English observers, in order to guard against the false im- 

 pressions of what had been seen which often result from conversation 

 with others, agreed each to communicate their results separately to 

 the Astronomer Royal, and not to tell each other what they had seen. 

 The beads of light which occur at the beginning and end of the totality 

 of the eclipse, and which are generally known as " Bailey's Beads," 

 were very markedly seen by most observers. The reason of their 

 occurrence, viz., the serrated edge of the moon, combined with the 

 irradiation of the sun's light seen in the hollows, seems to be so clearly 

 settled, that the phenomena are no longer subjects of wonder, and 

 hardly worthy of particular notice. 



The red prominences appear also to have been well seen, and to have 

 been decidedly proved to belong to the sun and not to the moon. On. 

 the occasion of the eclipse of 1842, they took observers so much by 

 surprise, that they were not prepared with any instrumental means to 

 ascertain the nature of these strange appearances, and the several ac- 

 counts varied alarmingly as to the number, size, and position of these 

 appendages. On the present occasion, however, from more attention 

 having been paid to the subject, the statements are much more uniform, 

 and observers seem positive to having seen the red prominences occul- 

 tated by the moon, which they regard as proof of their being solar phe- 

 nomena, being, in fact, masses of rose-colored light on the sun's surface, 

 upwards of 20,000 miles high. Prof. Smyth suggests the probability of 

 these red appendages being a kind of mirage produced by the action 

 of the sun's light on the surface of the moon ; at the same time he 

 admits that the weight of all the evidence on this subject is in favor 

 of the eclipse-flames being real appendages to the sun, and in that case 

 must be masses of such immense size as to play no unimportant part 

 in the economy of the sun, and even of the system itself. No true theory 

 now, therefore, of the sun can be attempted, without including these 

 monstrous flames ; and if we can only see them in the few and far 

 between intervals of total eclipses, thousands of years must elapse be- 

 fore we become much wiser. Mr. Nasmyth has called attention to the 

 subject of rendering these flames visible by some artificial total eclipse ; 

 and has proposed a method by which the sky in the vicinity of the 

 limb of the sun may be examined in comfort and comparative darkness. 

 A telescope being arranged in a dark room, in camera-obscura fashion, 

 is to throw the sun's image, not on to a white screen, but into a black 

 box, the sides of which will absorb all the light, while a sheet of card- 

 board, (white, blue, or green, to bring out the pink light,) with a hole 

 in the middle just large enough to allow the sun to pass through, being 

 placed on the top, will receive the image of the surrounding part of 

 the sky, into which the red flames from the sun are supposed to protrude. 

 This method has been tried at the Edinburgh Observatory, and found 

 to succeed completely so far as the destruction of the sun's light in the 

 dark box was concerned, but nothing in the shape of red flames was 

 seen on any occasion. This, however, could hardly have been expected, 

 on account of the excessive brightness of the adjacent portion of the 



