THE ECLIPSE EXPEDITION.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 168, 24 May 1872, Page 6

THE ECLIPSE EXPEDITION.

The recent solar eclipse, of which, two very admirable accounts appear in ' Nature/ from the pens of Mr. Norman Lockyer, and Mr. J. P. Maclear, seems to hare finally set at rest the little.doubt "which still remained as to the character of the" "corona"—to have proved completely, that it is a solar appendage, and not due : to the atmosphere of the earth. The observations were, in one of the Indian stations, very nearly spoiled by the ment of the natives, Who set the grass, on fire by way of a hostile demonstration against the monster who was eating up the sun; and had not the flames been speedilystamped out by the European guard, the smoke might materially have injured the telescopic observations. /'The rumors;" says Mr. Maclear, writing from Bekul, near Mangalore, on the Malabar coast,' "that our presence gave rise to among the natives were very amusing. First we heard that part of the sun' was about to fall, and the wise men had come to the Eastto prevent it. Then, when the formidable looking instruments were seen mounted on the fort, they thought there was a war, and we were engineers going to.put the fort in order to prevent a landing. This was strengthened by the fact that the Glasgow practised at a' target before, returning to Ceylon. This theory gave place to a flood about to descend, and that all the Europeans were coming > to the high ground to escape it." The scientific observers must have felt strangely amongst such critics of their proceedings—critics, too, who were British subjects. The complete ignorance not only of what they were doing, but of the whole province of interests with which these observers' lives were identified, must have realised for .them marvellously the great chasm still existing between man and man. ■