496 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
dazed to realise that all was over, and that the great eclipse of 
1896 had come and gone. If anything could have consoled us for 
our great disappointment, it was the universal expression of sym- 
pathy that we met with, not only from our many friends and 
colleagues, hut also from the kind-hearted Norwegians who had 
followed all our operations with the keenest interest, and furthered 
our endeavours in every possible way. 
After the eclipse was over we took several photographs of the 
instruments in situ, some of which will be handed round and may 
help to show the arrangement of the apparatus. By the afternoon 
of the 11th August everything had been transported to the town 
of Vadso, and on the 13th we began our homeward journey ; as 
we had been the first astronomers to arrive, the considerable bulk 
of our impedimenta caused us to be the last to leave. That night, 
at Vardo, we had the great pleasure of welcoming Dr Nansen and 
Lieut. Johannsen on their return from their famous expedition. 
Journeying by way of Trondhjem and Bergen, we reached New- 
castle on the 24th August. 
One result of our expedition has been to confirm Prof. Schae- 
berle’s experience that the fixed long-focus telescope with movable 
slide is really one of the most valuable forms of eclipse apparatus, 
and, if suitably arranged, is one of the easiest to manage. Mr 
Ramsay’s success in obtaining pictures of everything that was to 
be seen, under very unfavourable circumstances, abundantly con- 
firms what has just been said. One suggestion we should like to 
place on record here : if a direct-vision prism of suitable dispersion 
were made to slide easily into position in front of the object-glass, 
the same long-focus telescope could be used for securing spectro- 
grams as well as for taking pictures of the corona and promi- 
nences, devoting half the plates to one method and half to the other. 
In this way a single instrument could be made to yield the best 
results in the two most important branches of eclipse photography. 
