o 



16 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



the easiest to obsei-ve. At Burlington, Iowa, the time of contact 

 determined in this manner was about 5 seconds earlier than 

 that of any of the other observations, but agreed within one-third 

 of a second with that obtained from measurements of the photo- 

 graphs. 



Special attention was paid to the question whether the moon 

 has any atmosphere ; the results were wholly negative, under 

 circumstances where a refraction of one quarter of a second would 

 have been clearly perceptible. 



During the totality the following 9 bright lines were seen in 

 the spectrum of th(; prominences, — the numbers refer to the scale 

 of Kiri-h<)fl\ — namelv: (1) C, (2) 1017. o, (3) 1250 plus or mi- 

 nus 20, (4) l,oaO plus or minus 20, (.3) 1474, (G) F, (7) 2G02 

 plus or minus 2, (8) 279G, and (9) h. Of these all but the 2d, 

 3d, 4th, 5th, and 7th, are the well-known hydrogen lines; the 

 2d is the well-known but mysterious line above D. 



The line 1474 is just below E, and coincides exactly with a small 

 line marked as iron on Kirchoff's and Angstrom''s maps. It had 

 been previously discovered by Professor Young, in July. It turns 

 out also to coincide very closely if it is not (as is much more prob- 

 able) absolutely identical with a line recently discovered by Pro- 

 fessor Winlock, of Cambridge, in the spectrum of the aurora 

 borealis. (It is hardly conceivable that iroji really exists as vapor 

 in the aurora borealis. Can this line indicate some new gaseous 

 element which, occluded in ordinary iron, causes this line to appear 

 in the spectrum of the spark between iron electrodes, and yet 

 exists independently in our higher atmosphere?) The two faint 

 lines Nos. 3 and 4 also coincide closely with two other lines 

 reported by him. 



This line, 1474, and probably the two fainter ones, 2 and 3, 

 belong to the spectrum of the coronay not that of the prominences. 



The corona showed besides these bright lines a faint, continuous 

 spectrum without any dark lines. The light of this was polarized 

 strongly in a plane passing through the sun, but, as suggested by 

 Professor Pickering, this polarization may arise from tlie refrac- 

 tion of liglit through the five prisms that produced the dispersion 

 of the C()h)rs. 



Professor Young's papers were remarked upon by Professor 

 Peirce and by Dr. Gould in a very com})limentary manner, espe- 

 cially the first. The new method of observing contacts seems 

 likely to prove of value in the observations of the coming transit 

 of Venus. 



PAPERS ON THE ECLIPSE READ AT THE MEETING OF THE AMERI- 

 CAN ASSOCIATION. 



Dr. Baker Edwards, of Montreal, read a paper by Dr. Charles 

 Smallwood, of McGill College, Montreal. There was a slight 

 agitation of the sun's limb a second or two before the lirst con- 

 tact, the edge of the sun being lighted up with rose-colored i)ro- 

 tuheranct'S, shooting out coruscations of the same rose-colored 

 light towards the sun. The contrast between the color of the 



