394 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



a collocl ionized plate, although it was not visible to me in the telescope. 

 The stem was two minutes long (50,000 miles); the point was bent towards 

 the north, inclining downwards over towards the extremity of the detached 

 cloud. It is a very curious circumstance that this protuberance imprinted 

 itself distinctly, although it did not attract the eye directed especially to that 

 locality. This may be accounted for on the supposition that it emitted a 

 feeble purple light. 



" My own observations, and those of others, furnish an additional proof 

 that the luminous prominences belong to the sun, and not to the moon; 

 and this is placed beyond doubt by two photographs I obtained, at two dif- 

 ferent periods, during the totality. They show that the prominences retained 

 a fixed position in regard to the sun, and that, as successive portions of the 

 moon passed before them, they did not change either their form or appear- 

 ance, except in so far that the moon, by passing over them, shut off one 

 portion after another towards the east, while more was visible of those pro- 

 tuberances on the west; and fresh protuberances came into view, and were 

 depicted in the second photograph. A more important inference, leading to 

 the same physical conclusion, is, that the moon's disk distinctly slid between 

 the upper and the lower prominences, by a quantity measurable on the pho- 

 tographs. This is confirmed by the Astronomer Royal's measures of angu- 

 lar position of the prominences. 



"Just before and after the eclipse, sun-pictures were made; and during the 

 progress of the eclipse thirty-one photographs were obtained, the times of 

 which are carefully registered. These will serve hereafter to determine the 

 path of the moon across the sun's disk, and other data, with considerable 

 accuracy. The serrated edge of the moon is perfectly depicted in all the 

 photographs, and in some of them one cusp of the sun may be seen blunted 

 by the projections of a lunar mountain, while the other remains perfectly 

 sharp. The indentations of the concave side of the luminous prominences, 

 as seen in the photographs at the period of totality, are far greater than the 

 well-marked profiles of the lunar mountains shown in the photographs of 

 the other places of the eclipse. The surface of the sun, just bordering the 

 moon's dark disk, is brighter for a short distance than the other portions, 

 a phenomenon deserving of attention. 



" With the Kew Photo-heliograph the moon does not give the slightest 

 trace of a picture with an exposure of one minute; the pictures of the 

 luminous prominences, which were procured in the same time, are over- 

 exposed, and the corona has clearly depicted itself on both the plates; the 

 light of the corona is therefore more brilliant than that of the moon." 



M. LeVerrier observed the eclipse at Tarragona, in Spain, assisted by MM. 

 Chacornac and Yvon Yillarceau. In his official report to the French gov- 

 ernment, he says: "The first object I saw after the commencement of total- 

 ity was an isolated cloud separated from the moon's border by a space equal 

 to its own breadth, the whole about a minute and a half high by double that 

 length. Its color was a beautiful rose, mixed with shades of violet, and its 

 transparency seemed to increase even to brilliant white in some parts. A 

 little below, on the right, two clouds lay superimposed on each other, the 

 smaller above, and the two of very unequal brilliancy. The rest of the west- 

 ern edge of the disk, and the lower part, showed nothing more than the 

 corona, the light of which was perfectly white and of the greatest brilliancy. 

 But, thirty degrees below the horizontal diameter on the east, I discovered 

 two lofty and adjoining peaks, the upper sides both tinted with rosy and 



