ASTRONOMY AND METEOROLOGY. 367 



guessed at, and then pretty clearly discernible, but such a view as was 

 most convincing, and raised my wonder that I had never made the 

 discovery before. I can only account for it from the fact that, though 

 I have looked at the planet here with the telescope many times, I have 

 never scrutinised it carefully with the naked eye. Several of my 

 associates, whose attention I have since called to the planet, at once 

 told me in which direction the longer axis of the ring lay, and that too 

 without any previous knowledge of its position or acquaintance with 

 each other's opinion. This independent collateral testimony is very 

 satisfactory to me. I have somewhere seen it stated that in ancient 

 works on astronomy, written long before the discovery of the telescope, 

 Saturn is represented as of an oblong shape ; and that it has puzzled 

 astronomers much to account for it. Am I not correct in this impres- 

 sion ; and if so, is it not possible that here on these elevated and 

 ancient plains, where shepherds thousands of years ago watched their 

 flocks by night, and studied the wonders of the glorious canopy over 

 their heads, I have found a solution of the question ? After examin- 

 ing Saturn I turned to Venus. The most I could determine with my 

 naked eye was, that it shot out rays unequally, and appeared not to be 

 round ; but, on taking a dark glass of just the right opacity, I saw the 

 planet as a very minute but beautifully defined crescent. To guard 

 against deception, I turned the glass different ways and used different 

 glasses, and always with the same pleasing result. Let me say here 

 that I find the naked eye superior for these purposes to a telescope 

 formed of spectacle glasses, of six or eight magnifying power. This is 

 not, perhaps, very wonderful, considering that in direct vision both 

 eyes are used, without the straining of any one of the muscles around 

 them, and without spherical or chromatic aberration or the interposi- 

 tion of a dense medium. 



SOLAR PHENOMENA. 



At a meeting of the Astronomical Society, May 13th, Mr. James 

 Nasrnyth presented an account of some experiments which he had 

 tried, with the hope of imitating some of the phenomena of a total 

 solar eclipse, and thus obtaining a sight at the red projections from the 

 ed^e of the sun. It is, however, evident, that though the image of 



^j * ' * CJ J 



the sun itself may be completely and exactly concealed by some con- 

 trivance in the eye-piece, or permitted to pass through an aperture 

 into a dark chamber, while the equatorial movement is regulated pre- 

 cisely to apparent solar time, yet there will remain a great and, I fear, 

 insurmountable obstacle, in the luminosity of the earth's atmosphere, 

 enlightened by the sun's rays. This difficulty appears to have been 

 overlooked. If a telescope furnished with an eye-piece having a very 

 small field, or half the field covered, be directed to the sky close to the 

 border of the sun, the sun itself being just excluded, the glare is far 

 too powerful to be endured by the eye without the interposition of a 

 pretty deep tint of darkening glass. Such, at least, has been the case 

 under the most favorable circumstances of clear and deep blue sky, 



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