YET A YEAR LATER. 93 



Louisa, which form a triangle, each of whose sides is 

 five or six miles in length.' 



But in the meantime news had been received from 

 Sicily which conveyed the unpleasing impression that 

 the observations there had been all but complete 

 failures. In particular it was supposed that Mr, 

 Brothers, who had the management of the photographic 

 department there, had been unable to obtain any 

 useful results since no mention had yet been made 

 of Ids success. I was indeed as much surprised as 

 pleased, when I received a letter from him announcing 

 that he had secured five photographs of the corona, 

 in one of which the corona appeared ' as it had never 

 been seen on glass before.' It will be conceived that 

 I awaited with great interest even the first rough 

 sketch of the corona as there pictured. If the V- 

 shaped gap appeared in such sketch, the conclusion 

 would be inevitable that a real solar appendage exists 

 having an extension at least equal to that indicated by 

 the bounding edges of the gap that is, an extension 

 of at least 600,000 miles. If, on the other hand, that 

 well-marked peculiarity failed to present itself, the 

 inference would be that it does not exist in the photo- 

 graph, and that, therefore, the seeming gap was due to 

 some peculiarity of the atmospheric illumination at 

 the Spanish stations. It would not, in this case, be 

 by any means demonstrated that the sun has no 

 appendage reaching so far as five or six hundred 

 thousand miles from the sun's surface, but it would 

 be quite certain that the evidence given by the V- 



