ccurred
about midday in Judaea.

Later Micah writes--

"The sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be
dark over them."

Isaiah says that the "sun shall be darkened in his going forth," and
Jeremiah that "her sun is gone down while it was yet day." Whilst
Ezekiel says--

"I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not
give her light. All the bright lights of heaven will I make
dark over thee, and set darkness upon thy land, saith the Lord
God."

But a total eclipse is not all darkness and terror; it has a beauty and
a glory all its own. Scarcely has the dark moon hidden the last thread
of sunlight from view, than spurs of rosy light are seen around the
black disc that now fills the place so lately occupied by the glorious
king of day. And these rosy spurs of light shine on a background of
pearly glory, as impressive in its beauty as the swift march of the
awful shadow, and the seeming descent of the darkened heavens, were in
terror. There it shines, pure, lovely, serene, radiant with a light like
molten silver, wreathing the darkened sun with a halo like that round a
saintly head in some noble altar-piece; so that while in some cases the
dreadful shadow has awed a laughing and frivolous crowd into silence, in
others the radiance of that halo has brought spectators to their knees
with an involuntary exclamation, "The Glory!" as if God Himself had made
known His presence in the moment of the sun's eclipse.

And this, indeed, seems to have been the thought of both the
Babylonians and Egyptians of old. Both nations had a specially sacred
symbol to set forth the Divine Presence--the Egyptians, a disc with long
outstretched wings; the Babylonians, a ring with wings. The latter
symbol on Assyrian monuments is always shown as floating over the head
of the king, and is designed to indicate the presence and protection of
the Deity.

[Illustration: THE ASSYRIAN "RING WITH WINGS."]

We may take it for granted that the Egyptians and Chaldeans of old, as
modern astronomers to-day, had at one time or another presented to them
every type of coronal form. But there would, no doubt, be a difficulty
in grasping or remembering the irregular details of the corona as seen
in most eclipses. Sometimes, however, the corona shows itself in a
striking and simple form--when sun-spots are few in number, it spreads
itself out in two great equatorial streamers. At the eclipse of Algie