212 



Total Solar Eclipse of September 9, 1885. [Nov. 19, 



of which surprised me greatly. It was, of course, " boiling " a good 

 deal, but at the moment I caught sight of it, it seemed to have one 

 broad uniform equatorial belt, with at least its northern edge rather 

 sharply marked ; in breadth it seemed about one-third of the planet's 

 (polar) diameter, and in colour distinctly pink. This belt disappeared 

 and reappeared with the motion of the air. I shifted my eye in the 

 telescope, but the breadth and colour seemed constant on each 

 reappearance, so long as I looked, which was not, however, very 

 long. 



As the sun was just disappearing, the most striking phenomenon 

 I noticed, looking straight at it, was a strongly marked pulsation in 

 its light ; those who were looking away from it saw waves of shadow 

 passing rather rapidly over the ground. This also, I supposed, was 

 from the unsteadiness of the air, but to me it seemed not the least 

 striking part of the great spectacle to see the sun nickering as it were 

 before it went out. 



The following are my answers to the questions of the committee : — 



a. I estimated the greatest distance from the moon's limb to which 

 I could trace the corona as from two-thirds to three-fourths of a 

 diameter. 



b. The corona extended much farther in one direction than in any 

 other. By far the greatest feature in the corona was a broad-based 

 but hollow- sided cone of white light, with well-marked edges, and a 

 rather sharp point, the axis of which I judged to be from 40° to 45° 

 from the perpendicular towards the west. The "least extent " of the 

 corona, as I saw it, was the same in several places, where there was 

 only a narrow rim of light round the moon's limb. There were other 

 smaller but more or less similar prominences of pure white light, all 

 of which, I may say, gave me the idea of radiating from the sun's 

 centre. 



c. There was, in my opinion, no line of " approximate symmetry " 

 in the corona. I looked right round the sun with a view to answer 

 this question, and that was the conclusion I came to without hesita- 

 tion. As there was nothing to balance the large " cone," the nearest 

 approach to symmetry would have been obtained by taking its axis 

 as the line, but I should not have called the result of this division 

 " approximately symmetrical." 



The only red prominences I saw were a row of six or seven small 

 ones (Bailey's beads ?) extending from about the vertex towards the 

 east. Large ones were seen by others, and I believe are those which 

 alone appear in the photographs. 



Mr. J. R. Akersten obtained for me two photographs during totality, 

 one immediately after it began with an exposure of probably a little 

 less than a second ; the other a few seconds later, with about double 

 the exposure. A third plate was all but ready when the sun 



