EECREATIVE SCIENCE. 



281 



enter the cone h h, instead of passing on to 

 the apex/. 



Thus a considerable portion of the cone of 

 the earth's shadow will receive this refracted 

 light of the sun ; and this light will have a 

 reddish tinge, because it does not reach the 

 moon till after passing through a very great 

 thickness of the earth's atmosphere ; and 

 under such circumstances it is found that 

 the air will stop the blue and violet rays 

 which enter into the composition of white 

 light, and wUl transmit the red, an effect 

 corresponding to the ruddy colour of the sky. 

 at sunset. 



There will, however, remain a smaller cone, 

 c, of real darkness, which even the refracted 

 light will not enter ; but the apex of this lat- 

 ter cone is situated within the moon's shortest 

 distance from the earth, so that the moon 

 never gets into the cone of true darkness. 

 This being the case, the wonder is, not that 

 the moon should remain visible during a 

 total eclipse, but that it should ever com- 

 pletely disappear. It is, however, particu- 

 larly recorded to have become invisible during 

 total lunar eclipses in 1601, 1620, 1642, 1761, 

 and, in more recent times, on the 10th of 

 June, 1816, when it could not be discovered 

 even with telescopes ; yet on some of these 

 occasions, especially in the case of the eclipse 

 of April 25th, 1642, the air intervening be- 

 tween the moon and the observer was parti- 

 cularly pure, and minute stars could be 

 discerned. 



On the other hand, the moon has some- 

 times shown, during a total eclipse, with an 

 almost unaccountable distinctness. On De- 

 cember 22nd, 1703, the moon, when totally 

 immersed in the earth's shadow, was visible 

 at Avignon by a ruddy light of such bril- 

 liancy, that one might have imagined her 

 body to be transparent, and to be enlight- 

 ened from behind ; and on March 19th, 1848, 

 it is stated that so bright was the moon's sur- 

 face during its total immersion, that many 

 persons could not be persuaded that it was 



eclipsed. Mr. Eorster, of Bruges, states, in 

 an account of that eclipse, that the light and 

 dark places on the moon's surface could he 

 almost as well made out as in an ordinary 

 dull moonlight night. 



Sometimes, in a total lunar eclipse, the 

 moon will appear quite obscure in some parts 

 of its surface, and in other parts will exhibit 

 a high degree of illumination. All these 

 varying appearances, it is concluded, are to 

 be referred to the condition of that zone of 

 the earth's atmosphere through which the 

 rays pass from the sun into the cone of 

 shadow. To a certain extent, I witnessed 

 some of these phenomena during the merely 

 partial eclipse of February 7th; and though I 

 cannot find any published account of remark- 

 able phenomena observable during & partial 

 eclipse, I maintain that the one I witnessed 

 deserves to occupy avery high place, if judged 

 of with regard to its picturesque effect. 



I will therefore briefly narrate what I 

 saw. First, however, let me state that for 

 the foregoing explanations and descriptions 

 of phenomena, I am indebted to the valuable 

 works mentioned below,* and in four or five 

 sentences I have used their exact words. I 

 had some idea of borrowing merely the ideas, 

 and altering any sentence which I did not 

 indicate with quotation marks. But the 

 change would have been for the worse, and 

 the process similar to that indicated by Sir 

 Fretful Plagiary, whom, by the way, I quote 

 at second-hand, from a writer who is as much 

 the antithesis of Sheridan as his work is of 

 the Critic : — " Steal ! to be sure he may, and 

 serve your best thoughts as the gipsies do 

 stolen children — disfigure them to make them 

 pass for their own." 



I prepared, during the afternoon of Fe- 

 bruary 6th, for witnessing the eclipse, with- 

 out any distinct expectation of seeing much 



* Nichol's " Cyclopoedia of the Physical Sciences;" 

 Grant's" History of Physical Astronomy;" Humboldt's 

 " Cosmos ;" Mann's " Guide to the Knowledge of the 

 Heavens." 



