ical
character with that depicted in the beginning of the year, but not
enough to convey additional information about its terminal forms or
innermost structure. Any better result was indeed impossible, the
moisture-laden air having cut down the actinic power of the coronal
light to one-fourth its previous value.

Two English expeditions organized by the Royal Astronomical Society
fared still worse. Mr. Taylor was stationed on the West Coast of Africa,
one hundred miles south of Loanda; Father Perry chose as the scene of
his operations the Salut Islands, off French Guiana. Each was supplied
with a reflector constructed by Dr. Common, endowed, by its extremely
short focal length of forty-five, combined with an aperture of twenty
inches, with a light-concentrating force capable, it was hoped, of
compelling the very filmiest coronal branches to self-registration. Had
things gone well two sets of coronal pictures, absolutely comparable in
every respect, and taken at an interval of two hours and a half, would
have been at the disposal of astronomers. But things went very far from
well. Clouds altogether obscured the sun in Africa; they only separated
to allow of his shining through a saturated atmosphere in South America.
Father Perry's observations were the last heroic effort of a dying man.
Stricken with malaria, he crawled to the hospital as soon as the eclipse
was over, and expired five days later, at sea, on board the _Comus_. He
was buried at Barbados. And the sacrifice of his life had, after all,
purchased no decisive success. Most of the plates exposed by him
suffered deterioration from the climate, or from an inevitably delayed
development. A drawing from the best of them by Miss Violet Common[569]
represented a corona differing from its predecessor of January 1,
chiefly through the oppositely unsymmetrical relations of its parts.
Then the western wing had been broader at its base than the eastern; now
the inequality was conspicuously the other way.[570]

The next opportunity for retrieving the mischances of the past was
offered April 16, 1893. The line of totality charted for that day ran
from Chili to Senegambia. American parties appropriated the Andes; both
shores of the Atlantic were in English occupation; French expeditions,
led by Deslandres and Bigourdan, took up posts south of Cape Verde. A
long totality of more than four minutes was favoured by serene skies;
hence an ample store of photographic data was obt