April 5, 1906] 



NA TURE 



537 



its ability to use materials at command and fit them 

 to its needs. The highest degree of civilisation in 

 maritime races has always been marked by activity 

 in boat-building- and by variety of design and rig. 

 In no case has this been more notable than in the 

 history of China and of Holland, and in the Adriatic 

 in the fifteenth century, in Europe during the last 

 two centuries and in the United States since 1780. 

 The Negro, the American Indian, and the Slav, on 

 the other hand, have never designed a sea-going boat 

 or cut a sail. It has not been for want of water-ways 

 or of opportunity. It has been simply owing to a 

 lower class of intelligence and to want of originality 

 and enterprise." 



Mr. Smyth's allusions to the indirect influence upon 

 character and resource of life and work in vessels 

 equipped with sail power are also notable : — " It is 

 above all in the men who handle sails that the self- 

 reliance which is bred by tempest, darkness and the 

 shadow of the Angel of Death reaches its highest 

 point. The seriousness, from this point of view, of 

 the loss of masts and yards to the Navy has been 

 fully recognised, and it has only been reluctantly ac- 



Fig. 2.— Hong Kong Junk. 



'• Mast and Sail in Europe and As 



ceded to on account of the pressing importance of 

 other more essential forms of training. But amongst 

 the coasters and fishermen of the world the mast and 

 sail more than hold their own ; and here a student of 

 the sea will find himself in a by-path of the modern 

 world, among the old thoughts, the old traditions, 

 the old methods, and the old virtues of the great 

 sims. And when this civilisation shall have con- 

 demned itself and passed the way of others, the lug- 

 sail and the lateen will still be navigating the deep, 

 conned by other races, but the same grim, great- 

 hearted sailor men." 



Enough has been said to indicate that, in our judg- 

 ment, this book should find a hearty welcome from all 

 who love to sail the seas and manage their own craft, 

 and from all who are interested in the maintenance and 

 development of that hardy race of seamen bred on the 

 coasts of the United Kingdom, and leading a life of 

 hardship, difficulty, and danger which must develop 

 qualities of the highest value to the maritime great- 

 ness of the British Empire. 



W. H. White. 



NO. I9OI, VOL. 73] 



THE SOLAR ECLIPSE OF 1905. 



IT is very satisfactory that reports of the recent 

 eclipse expeditions indicate that at some stations 

 the weather conditions were all that could be desired, 

 because we know that at several stations op- 

 portunities for securing good results were frus- 

 trated by clouds. The Hamburg Observatory 

 party chose a spot which, however, did not 

 come under the second category, and judging by the 

 first portion of the report published, 1 which deals 

 chiefly with the genera] arrangements and journey 

 to and from the position of observation, it achieved 

 complete success in all lines of work. The report 

 itself is of great interest, and is accompanied, not 

 only by excellent reproductions from photographs of 

 camp scenes, &c, but by capital pictures of the 

 corona. The style of reproduction here employed is 

 to be highly recommended, and other publishers of 

 reports might with advantage copy the good example 

 set. 



The party was not a very large one. It consisted 

 of Prof. R. Schorr, the director of the observatory, 

 Dr. Schwassman, the observer, and an observatory 

 attendant, Herr Beyermann, and they were assisted 

 by Prof. Knopf, director of the Jena Observatory, who 

 joined the expedition. 



The station selected and used as the observing 

 position was Souk-Ahras, in Algeria, lying on the 

 railway from Tunis, and to the south-west of Bone. 

 The accompanying illustration shows the station 

 occupied, with the several instruments in position. 

 The work of the expedition was chiefly devoted to 

 the following points : — structure of the inner corona ; 

 photography of the outer corona and extensions ; a 

 search after intra-Mercurial planets ; the determination 

 of the brightness of the corona and the total day- 

 light during the eclipse; contact, meteorological, and 

 other observations. The only spectroscopic work 

 attempted was the employment of a Thorp diffraction 

 grating to secure the spectrum of the corona. 



For the attack on the inner corona a horizontal 

 telescope of 20 metres focal length was employed. 

 With this, very excellent photographs were obtained. 

 Perhaps the most interesting part of the account of 

 these photographs is the recording of three or four 

 oval, ring-formed, cloud-like caps which lay at a 

 distance of 4 to 6 minutes of arc above the large 

 prominence on the east limb, and indicated a close 

 connection with the eruptive nature of the promin- 

 ence. These rings, it may be remembered, were also 

 photographed by the Greenwich Observatory party 

 under" the direction of the Astronomer Royal, which 

 observed at Sfax, in Tunisia, so that an independent 

 photographic record of them is very important, as 

 this is the first time they have been caught on the 

 sensitive film. That such phenomena have been 

 previously seen will be gathered from the following 

 extract- relating to some spectroscopic observations 

 made bv Sir Norman Lockyer in 1S70 : — 



" And what was going on, while this was happen- 

 ing? A prominence, obviously with its root some 

 distance from the limb, had gradually travelled beyond 

 the limb ; in appearance it became very much more 

 elevated, and seen, as it were, in perspective over 

 the limb; but what I saw first was very rapidly 

 changed, in a way that would be explained by sup- 

 posing that cyclones were being shot up into the 

 solar air like bombs ! the changes in the F line were 

 so rapid and curious. I was not observing with an 

 open slit, so I at once coined the term ' motion 

 forms,' because the forms observed did not in any 

 way represent the shape of the prominence. But the 



1 MUtheilungtJi tier Hamburger SUrmoarte, No. IO. 

 2 " Solar Physics," by Sir J. Norman Lockyer, p. 403. 



