60 



AUSTRALASIA. 



Prof. Burckhalter designed doing little, but 

 doing it well. The ingenious device mentioned 

 above, one of his own inventions, was intended 

 to control the exposure so as to give the outer 

 and fainter streamers a long exposure, and the 

 bright inner ones and the chromosphere a shorter 

 one upon the same plate, a feat never before ac- 

 complished. This was done by a revolving disk 

 in front of the plate, with slits cut out of it wide 

 at the circumference and narrow at the center. 

 The disk was made to revolve by clockwork at 

 the back of the plate, the attachment passing 

 through a hole made in the plate itself. This 

 hole, falling in the center of the Moon's disk, did 

 no particular harm, its effect on the print being 

 strikingly like some newly discovered crater on 

 the Moon. The light intensity transmitted to 

 the plate at the farthest limits of the corona 

 and streamers, being the same as at the Moon's 

 limb, prevents an overexposure at the latter re- 

 gion and an underexposure at the former. This 

 arrangement, as used at the eclipse in India, 

 gave an exposure at the outer corona of four 

 seconds, against only 0.08 of a second at the 

 inner. At the meeting of the Royal Astronomical 

 Society attention was drawn to the beauty of 

 the details in the inner corona as seen on the 

 photograph, and especially to a formation in the 

 northwest quadrant, which was not shown on 

 any of the other photographs. 



Astrographic Chart. The Savilian Professor 

 of Astronomy at Oxford University Observatory, 

 speaking of the measurement and reduction of 

 the plates for the Astrographic Catalogue, says 

 that only 586 plates out of 1,180 required to in- 

 clude the entire sky have been measured, and 

 525 of them are completely reduced. The scheme 

 is less favorably considered by astronomers than 

 formerly. 



Prof. Turner has found that sometimes 300 or 

 400 stars are depicted on his plates, 2 degrees 

 by 2 degrees square, with only twenty seconds' 

 exposure, and that with a three-minute exposure 

 in the region of this area, whose center is in 

 right ascension 19& 43 m , declination north 29, 

 2,440 stars were measured. To avoid having too 

 many stars on the plate, he found it necessary 

 to reduce the time of exposure. 



As the result of the laborious investigation 

 carried out by Prof. E. C. Pickering, of Harvard 

 College Observatory, it has been found that with 

 a photographic doublet lens large fields are ob- 

 tainable sensibly free from optical distortion. 

 This being the case, astronomers begin to enter- 

 tain the opinion that the scheme of further com- 

 pleting the astrographic chart with its hour's 

 exposure of plates, embracing an area of only 

 2 degrees by 2 degrees square, is a waste of time 

 and labor, and the taking of these long-exposure 

 plates is being abandoned. 



AUSTRALASIA, one of the grand divisions 

 of the globe, consisting of the continent of Aus- 

 tralia and island colonies of Great Britain, with 

 interjacent islands. With the exception of the 

 Dutch and German portions of New Guinea, the 

 German protectorates of Bismarck Archipelago 

 and the northern Solomon Islands, the French 

 colony of New Caledonia, and the New Hebrides 

 and smaller islands under native rule, all the 

 islands of Australasia are British colonies and 

 dependencies. The five colonies in Australia and 

 the colonies of Tasmania and New Zealand are 

 self-governing, having each its representative 

 Legislature, with a responsible ministry, dispos- 

 ing of its own revenues, and making its own laws 

 under a charter granted by the British Parlia- 

 ment, subject to a certain reserved veto power 



of the Imperial Government and to the appellate 

 jurisdiction of the Judicial Committee of the 

 British House of Lords in matters of imperial 

 concern. The Crown is represented in each col- 

 ony by a governor, who as the executive head 

 of the colonial Government acts on the advice of 

 responsible ministers selected from the party or 

 coalition that forms the majority in the Legisla- 

 tive Assembly. The Crown colony of Fiji is ad- 

 ministered in accordance with native laws and 

 customs, and its Governor is High Commissioner 

 for the Western Pacific, having supervision of 

 the other islands under native rule. _ 



Area and Population. The area in square 

 miles of the British Australasian colonies, accord- 

 ing to the latest surveys, and their estimated 

 population on Dec. 31, 1897, are given in the fol- 

 1 Q wing table: 



* Census of 1896. 



The estimate of population for New South 

 Wales was made on June 30, 1898. The number 

 of males was computed at 715,835; females, 619,- 

 965. Sydney, the capital, had, with its suburbs, 

 an estimated population in 1897 of 417,250. The 

 number of aborigines in 1891 was 5,097; of half- 

 castes, 3,183. 



In Queensland the aborigines are estimated at 

 12,000. There is still some immigration of Chi- 

 nese into Queensland, the number of arrivals in 

 1897 having been 455 and of departures 398. The 

 arrivals of Polynesians numbered 935 and de- 

 partures 924. The population of Brisbane and its 

 environs in 1897 was estimated at 105,734. The 

 total population of the colony on Dec. 31, 1898, 

 was estimated to be 499,000, consisting of 280,000 

 males and 219,000 females. 



The population of Victoria was estimated for 

 June 30, 1898. Melbourne, the capital, contained 

 458,610, nearly 40 per cent, of the total popula- 

 tion of the colony; Ballarat, 46,137; Sandhurst, 

 43,075. There has been for five years an annual 

 excess of emigrants over immigrants, which was 

 14,547 in 1896 and 19,949 during the three years 

 preceding, due to departures for the gold fields of 

 Western Australia. 



The population of South Australia comprised 

 183,920 males and 174,304 females. There were 

 3,848 Chinamen in the colony in 1891. The num- 

 ber of aborigines was then estimated at 3,134 

 1,661 males and 1,473 females. Adelaide, the capi- 

 tal, contained, with its suburbs, 146,125 inhabit- 

 ants in 1897. 



The population of Western Australia consisted 

 of 110,359 males and 51,565 females. Perth, the 

 capital, had 37,929 inhabitants. The number of 

 aborigines in the colony can not be estimated, as 

 they live mostly in unexplored regions. There 

 were 5,670 civilized aborigines in 1891. At the 

 end of 1898 the population of the colony was 

 estimated at 168,150. The number of arrivals 

 during the year was 32,709; departures, 28,756. 



In New Zealand the population consisted of 

 371,415 males and 331,945 females. Of the total 

 Avhite population, 340,631 were found on the 

 North island, 362,236 on the Middle island, and 



