Ixxv 
Thus, had I no other guide than my own observations, I should 
have surmised that the phenomenon was an incomplete variety of 
the circumzenithal halo accompanied with mock suns (parhelia), 
such as are frequently seen in cold climates, and which have been 
shown by mathematicians to be producible by crystals of ice, of 
definite forms, floating in the air (it must have frozen in the 
higher air on April 5th), and as have been imitated by M. Bravais 
by means of prisms and other crystal-like forms of glass.—The 
halo had dissolved before the sun had set, as if dispelled by a 
brisk east wind. The full moon of that day, rising as the sun 
was setting, became visible from the drawing-room windows of my 
house soon after it had surmounted the horizon, as the crest of the 
hill to the east of them is only a little above their level ; and it 
was watched thence by my wife until 10°30 p.m. (whilst I had 
several out-of-door looks) for any unusual lunar phenomena; but 
none appeared. 
A word, however, by way of comparison, about observations 
recorded elsewhere. It is plain from the description in the 
Western Chronicle of Science, that the Editor was absent from his 
residence on Harbour Terrace, Falmouth, on April the 5th; and 
therefore the data for the diagram he gives were not obtained by 
himself in that neighbourhood ; nor is there any hint as to where, 
or by whom, they were obtained, any further than that it repre- 
sents what was ‘“‘seen by many observers throughout the west.” 
This diagram places two parhelia at the extremities of a dis- 
cernible horizontal diameter of a visible bow constituting five- 
sixths of the circumference of a circle described round the 
Sun as a centre, and whose radius equals (not being merely 
half of) the inverted bow of one-sixth of a circle above. There 
are other points im the description that are not coincident, and 
some that are coincident, with mine. It is also subjoined that 
at 7°30 p.m. the moon seemed to be at the intersection of the 
arms of a reddish cross. It would have been interesting to 
know whether all the solar phenomena mentioned in the Chronicle, 
forming a completer system of haloes than any one described in 
Symons’s Magazine, were observed at one place, or if they are 
summarized from different sources of information. However this 
may be, that the phenomena were dissimilar as seen at places 
widely apart is clear from the accounts in the Magazine. At 
Bideford, for example, they were limited to a prismatic horse-shoe 
halo around the Sun. At Sherborne, only “pillars” of light pro- 
jecting from the Sun were seen. 
From the Western Chronicle of Science we learn that the meteor- 
ological incidents of April 5th were not confined to Haloes; for 
we are informed that two mirages were seen by a lady from Harbour 
