282 Astronomical Notes. 



the Earth is the axis round which the moon revolves. A 

 perfect illustration of this may be seen by fastening a piece 

 of string to a small ball, make a loop in the other end of the 

 string for, say, a pencil to go through, hold the pencil in the 

 hand and twirl the ball round with sufficient velocity to keep 

 the string tight. It would be inaccurate in those circum- 

 stances to say that the ball is revolving on its own axis ; but 

 that the axis on which it is revolving is undoubtedly the pencil 

 through the loop at the end of the string. The conditions in 

 this experiment are exactly similar to those which exist 

 betwixt the Earth and the moon. 



Partial Eclipse of the Sun. 



This took place on the 17th of April under most favour- 

 able conditions, there being a cloudless sky. The time of 

 the first contact at Edinburgh was stated to be 10.55 a.m. 

 The latitude of Edinburgh being nearly the same as that of 

 Dumfries, I therefore took this as our time, and had the 

 telescope directed to the sun a few minutes in advance. The 

 sun being at his minimum spot period, there was not a mark 

 on his disc, saw the limb of the moon touch the south-west 

 limb of the sun at the predicted time, as far as we could judge 

 (none of our clocks showing Greenwich mean time). Know- 

 ing the very spot on the sun's limb where the moon would 

 first touch, we carefully watched, trying to see the edge of the 

 dark moon, but could not discover a trace of it a moment 

 before contact. Watching carefully, we suddenly saw the 

 first touch. At 11. 11 a large range of mountains on the 

 moon's periphery were silhouetted on the sun's disc. At 

 11.20 another single mountain appeared, standing out quite 

 prominent; round the edge of the moon on the sun's disc 

 there was a flickering light wave; but at the angles of the 

 junctions the edges of both sun and moon were perfectly 

 sharp. As the eclipse proceeded there was a gradual diminu- 

 tion of light and heat, with a kind of gloomy appearance and 

 feeling, which seemed to settle down on everything. The 

 eclipse reached its maximum at 12. 11, when about three- 

 quarters of the sun's disc was covered. The end was at 1.27 

 p.m. Our mind was so taken up with the actual eclipse that 



