380 Professor C. Piazzi Smyth's 



the size and often the shape of those observed during the 

 eclipse ; yet, on weighing the whole of the evidence, there 

 does seem a great preponderance in favour of the eclipse- 

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

 must be masses of such vast size, as to play no unimportant 

 part in the economy of the sun, and even the system itself. 

 No true theory, therefore, of the sun can be attempted with- 

 out including these monstrous flames, and if we are only to 

 see them in the few and very far between intervals of total 

 eclipses, thousands of years must elapse before we become 

 much wiser; it becomes, therefore, the duty of astronomers 

 to devise some methods by which the flames (supposing them 

 to be real) may be rendered visible by some artificial total 

 eclipse, which may be put into practice at any time. Mr 

 Nasmyth has been calling attention to this subject, and has 

 proposed a method of pretty effectually " taking the sun in, 

 and doing for him" and all his light, so as to examine the 

 sky in comfort and comparative darkness immediately round 

 about his limb. 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, 

 or 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 sur- 

 rounding part of the sky, into which the red flames from 

 the sun are supposed to protrude. 



This method has been tried, at Mr Nasmyth's suggestion, 

 in the Edinburgh Observatory, and found to be a very power- 

 ful one, so far as the complete destruction of the sun's light 

 in the dark box was concerned, though there was the large 

 quantity of it transmitted by a six-inch object-glass ; for at 

 the very time that the sun's image was passing into the black 

 box, the room was fully darker than the general atmosphere 

 during a total eclipse. Nothing, however, in the shape of the 

 red flames was seen on any occasion, but could hardly have 

 been expected, on account of the excessive brightness of the 

 adjacent portion of sky, caused by the multitudinous reflec- 

 tions of the sun's light in the atmosphere outside the Obser- 



