terval of obscurity. At Novaya Zemlya, however, of all places, the
conditions were tolerably favourable, and, as we have seen, the trophy
of a "flash-spectrograph" was carried off. Some coronal photographs,
moreover, taken by the late Sir George Baden-Powell[574] and by M.
Hansky, a member of a Russian party, were marked by features of
considerable interest. They made apparent a close connection between
coronal outflows and chromospheric jets, cone-shaped beams serving as
the sheaths, or envelopes, of prominences. M. Hansky,[575] indeed,
thought that every streamer had a chromospheric eruption at its base.
Further, dark veinings of singular shapes unmistakably interrupted the
coronal light, and bordered brilliant prominences,[576] reminding us of
certain "black lines" traced by Swift across the "anvil protuberance"
August 7, 1869.[577] In type the corona of 1896 reproduced that of 1886,
as befitted its intermediate position in the solar cycle.

The eclipse-track on January 22, 1898, crossed the Indian peninsula from
Viziadrug, on the Malabar coast, to Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Not
a cloud obstructed the view anywhere, and an unprecedented harvest of
photographic records was garnered. The flash-spectrum, in its successive
phases, appeared on plates taken by Sir Norman Lockyer, Mr. Evershed,
Professor Campbell,[578] and others; Professor Turner[579] set on foot a
novel mode of research by picturing the corona in the polarised
ingredient of its light; Mrs. Maunder[580] practically solved the
problem of photographing the faint coronal extensions, one ray on her
plates running out to nearly six diameters from the moon's limb. Yet she
used a Dallmeyer lens of only one and a half inches aperture. Her
success accorded perfectly with Professor Wadsworth's conclusion that
effectiveness in delineation by slight contrasts of luminosity varies
inversely with aperture. Triple-coated plates, and a comparatively long
exposure of twenty seconds, contributed to a result unlikely, for some
time, to be surpassed. The corona of 1898 presented a mixed aspect. The
polar plumes due at minimum were combined in it with the quadrilateral
ogives belonging to spot-maxima. A slow course of transformation, in
fact, seemed in progress; and it was found to be completed in 1900, when
the eclipse of May 28 revealed the typical halo of a quiescent sun.

The obscurity on this occasion was short--less than 100 seconds--but was
well observed east and w