42 
offers a deviation from the extremes only of 0° 3' 15'\ 
and calculating by degrees, is 8° 14' 0" west from that 
observatory. As I had not yet received my instruments 
when this eclipse took place, I made my observations 
with one of Dollond's small acromatic telescopes, one 
foot wide in its focus, which I was obliged to hold in 
the hand; this compelled me to adopt the average cal- 
culation, as I was to suppose the final contact of the 
eclipse some seconds sooner than the real one. As to 
the calculation of the time it was exact, because I had 
a chronometer, whose going was settled by a great 
number of observations made not only on that day, but 
both before and after it. 
Having measured many azimuthal angles, the mag- 
netical declination gave 21° 13' 24'' west. 
Notwidistanding the difficulties which I met in form- 
ing a collection of objects of natural history, 1 succeed- 
ed in gathering at Tangier and in the bay several things, 
and amongst those some very fine fuci. I plucked? up 
several sea plants from the bottom of the sea, in a per- 
fect state. 
Mahometans have great difficulties to surmount in 
making entomological collections. In the first instance, 
the legal purity forbids the touching of unclean animals; 
in the next place, they are forbid to burn any animal 
alive: the first obstacle makes it very difficult to form a 
collection of coleopteres; and the second makes that of 
all sorts of butterflies useless, because if fixt on a pin 
that is not heated they flutter violently before they die, 
so as to destroy their beauty. It happened to me one 
day from this cause, that having fixed on a pin a beetle 
in a box which contained several other insects, he got 
loose from his spit, and damaged all the others that I 
had collected there; one of these was a false tarantula of 
a very large and very interesting kind. 
