191 
SCIENTIFIC SUMMARY. 
ASTRONOMY. 
ANNIVERSARY Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society . — At this 
meeting,, which took place on February 9, the gold medal of the Society 
was awarded to Professor Schiaparelli, for his researches into the connection 
subsisting between meteors and comets. In our summaries during the past 
four or five years, the details of Schiaparelli’s researches, as they have been 
severally announced, have been fully discussed. At the same meeting the 
following officers were elected for the ensuing twelve months : President, 
Professor Cayley ; Vice-Presidents, Professor Adams, Drs. De La Rue and 
Huggins, and Mr. Lassell ; Treasurer, Mr. Whitbread ; Secretaries, Messrs. 
Dunkin and Proctor ; Foreign Secretary, Lieut.-Colonel Strange. 
The Eclipse of December 12, 1871. — The observations made during the 
eclipse of last December were, on the whole, remarkably successful. The 
Australian observers had bad weather, and one of the observing parties in 
India was similarly unfortunate ; but at all the other stations very favour- 
able conditions prevailed. A full account of the operations of the various 
parties will be found in these pages elsewhere, and therefore in this place 
we shall merely summarize the work which has been accomplished. The 
expedition from England distributed along the part of the shadow track 
between Bekul on the western coast of India, and the northern extremity of 
Ceylon, did excellent work. Five good photographs of the corona were 
taken by Mr. Davis, who accompanied this expedition at Lord Lindsay’s 
charge. They show the corona widely extended, alike in all the pictures, 
and with permanent rifts. Professor Respighi, the well known Italian 
spectroscopist, also accompanied this expedition. He took out with him 
the instrument with which he has drawn his excellent series of solar profiles 
during the past three years. Using this instrument, he obtained a spectrum 
of images of the chromatosphere and prominences (seeing at the same 
time the red, orange-yellow, blue-green, and indigo pictures of the ring of 
prominences), and a spectrum of images of the inner corona, these images 
being formed by the yellow-green light corresponding to Kirchhoff’s 1474, 
and by red and blue-green light corresponding to the C and F lines of 
hydrogen. The yellow-green image extended about eight minutes from the 
limb of the eclipsed sun, and was well defined at its outer edge, though 
fainter there than near the sun. It is demonstrated, therefore, that a solar 
atmosphere extends to at least the observed distance from the sun, and that 
