












TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN, JULY 28, 1851. 339 
seconds had elapsed. The time stated as the commencement of the eclipse, is, 
therefore, probably two seconds too late. This was 2" 53™ 4*4 Goteborg mean 
time. 
There were numerous mountains on the moon’s limb, which gave it a sensibly 
serrated appearance, and it was much more sharply defined than that of the 
sun. The gradually decreasing brightness of the sun’s disc from the centre to- 
wards the edges, which is pointed out by Mr Arry in his account of the eclipse of 
1842, was best seen when the sun was about half covered by the moon. 
Repeated attempts were now made with the naked eye, with the telescope, and 
with a French opera-glass of 1-9 inches aperture, and 5:8 inches focal distance, 
to ascertain whether the moon’s disc was sensibly illuminated, and whether any 
part of its limb was visible beyond the sun. But although in every trial, the 
sun’s light was as little diminished by the dark glasses as the eye could bear, the 
face of the moon looked quite black, and no part of its limb was visible beyond 
the sun’s disc. 
During the progress of the eclipse, the cusps continued perfectly sharp, as re- 
" presented in fig. 3, until the sun was reduced to an extremely narrow crescent of 
90°, or less, when they began to assume a decidedly rounded appearance (fig. 4). 
It seemed as if the light had flowed beyond its proper boundary, so as to invade 
the province of darkness; the cusps becoming disfigured, much as they would 
have been had one attempted to draw their outline in ink upon blotting paper, 
where the ink flowed slightly beyond the limit traced by the pen.* 
Daylight had now greatly diminished, and the air felt chilly. Towards the 
west, in the direction of the approaching shadow of the moon, the sky looked ex- 
tremely black and frowning, and the whole landscape wore a peculiarly cold and 
desolate air. The light had much of the ordinary gray tint of morning, and less 
than I expected of the peculiar greenish hue I remember to have observed at 
Edinburgh, in the eclipses of May 1836 and July 1842; and as the totality ap- 
proached, the sky assumed a more cloudy appearance than it had at the com- 
mencement of the eclipse, either from the actual formation of clouds, or as I 
could not help thinking, from something in the altered state of the light render- 
ing the existing clouds more visible. 
The sun was now nearly gone, and darkness was coming on with a degree of 
rapidity which was quite startling. From the accounts of previous eclipses, I 
was prepared to anticipate something very awful; but I certainly did not expect 
that this part of the phenomenon would have affected me so much. An instan- 
* SHAKESPEARE makes Hecate say :— 
“« Upon the corner of the moon 
There hangs a vaporous drop profound.”’ 
This odd fancy forms no unapt description of the rounded appearance of the cusps, which certainly 
looked very much as if a drop of liquid were depending from them, 
VOL XX. PART III. 42 
