448 APPENDIX. 



Aurora at the same times to observers not more than from ten 

 to thirty miles apart, and also by its being visible to persons 

 on board the sliip at Chamisso Island, after it had vanished 

 in Escholtz Bay, only ten miles distant, as well as by the 

 Aurora being seen by the barge detached from the Blossom 

 several days before it was visible to persons on board the 

 ship, about two hundred miles to the southward of her. 



Captain Franklin has mentioned a similar circumstance in 

 his notices on the Aurora Borealis in his first expedition, 

 when Dr. Richardson and Mr. Kendall were watching for 

 the appearance of the meteor by agreement, and when it was 

 seen by the former actively sweeping across the heavens and 

 exhibiting prismatic colours, without any appearance of the 

 kind being witnessed by the latter, then only twenty miles 

 distant from his companion. Captain Parry also, in his 

 Third Voyage, describes the Aurora as being seen even be- 

 tween the hills and the ship anchored at Port Bowen. 



Dr. Halley and other philosophers have supposed that the 

 coruscations of the Aurora proceeded always in radii perpen- 

 dicular to the surface of the earth, in the direction of the mag- 

 netic meridian from the poles towards the equator, and the 

 former has ingeniously accounted for the apparent deviations 

 occasionally witnessed on the principles of perspective ; but 

 this explanation is not quite satisfactory, as Captains Parry, 

 Franklin, and ourselves, in Kotzebue Sound, have seen these 

 rays emanate from almost all parts of the horizon, and ac- 

 tually pass the zenith. At the same time I am disposed to be- 

 lieve, from my own observation, that the radii in general take 

 the perpendicular direction above alluded to, probably on ac- 

 count of the less resistance they meet in the higher regions of 

 the atmosphere than in such as near the surface of the earth ; 

 and this will partly account for the appearance of the cone 

 formed at the zenith of the ships at Melville Peninsula, des- 

 cribed in Captain Parry's Second Voyage, page 146, and of 

 another very similar, witnessed by ourselves in Kotzebue Sound 

 on the 26th August, 1827, on which occasion the rays shot up 

 from all directions, and formed over our zenith the perfect ap- 

 pearance of a tent stretched upon a number of poles united at 



