DAY AURORA. 
321 
A daylight aurora has been described by other ob- 
servers. I witnessed several, one of them interesting 
enough to he worth transcribing. 
“About ten o’clock, going out to exercise at foot- 
ball, I noticed that the usual cloud-hank of the hori- 
zon had nearly cleared away at the south. One or 
two feathery cirri hung about the zenith, and the north- 
ern horizon retained its usual deep obscurity. This 
was in the course of my usual cursory examination for 
my weather record. Half an hour after, I observed one 
spot where the hanking remained, attracting attention 
by its nearness to the sun and its well-defined seg- 
mentary character. Its margin was distinctly and reg- 
ularly arched ; its tinting a peculiar purple, slightly 
warmed or bronzed at its margins, hut deepening into 
a heavy brown at the line of the horizon. The centre 
of the segment bore south twenty degrees west (mag- 
netic), its altitude eight degrees, nearly. Smoke and 
vapor from ship’s fires, purple-tinted ; distant objects 
not very clearly visible; atmosphere filled with ice 
spicula3. 
“ Soon from the circumference of this arch proceed- 
ed a fimbriated or fringy series of purple cirri, delicate- 
ly tinted at their edges, increasing with wonderful reg- 
ularity, and extending in long, ray-like processes of 
cloud to an altitude of some twenty degrees above the 
horizon. Before eleven o’clock these processes had 
become long, stratiform illuminated clouds, beautifully 
marked, of a breadth, measured roughly by the eye, 
of four or five degrees, interrupted where they crossed 
the illuminated region of the sun, hut every where else 
extending over the heavens to the south and west 
(true) ; and although still diminishing in intensity, ex- 
tending nearly to the eastern quarter ' of the sky. By 
X 
