referred. The eclipse now under consideration was admirably suited for this investigation, for the terrestrial conditions were such as to enable the observations to be made both near the beginning and the end of the phenomenon. Further, as the sun spots were at the time very abundant, it might be presumed that the sun was in a condition of exceptional activity, and consequently it seemed reasonable to suppose that, in sympathy with what was going on below, the corona would be in a disturbed state. Unfortunately, however, it was not found practicable to make use of the extreme end of the track of the shadow.
The English Brazilian party, consisting of Messrs. Taylor and Shackleton, were stationed at Para Cura. The African party was organized on a somewhat larger scale. Professor Thorpe was placed in command of it, and he was accompanied by Lieutenant Hills, R.E., Sergeant Kearney, R.E., and Messrs. Fowler, Gray, and Forbes, from the Royal College of Science. They were despatched to Bathurst, thence to make their way to a station in French Senegambia only a few miles south of the central line of totality.
As the pictures of the corona vary so much with the instrument employed, it is clearly desirable to have some means of discriminating between the actual changes which may have taken place in the structure of the corona itself between one eclipse and the next, and those differences in the representation of it which merely arise from instrumental causes. There is no means of attaining this end so simple and so secure as to provide that the same photographic apparatus shall be used on each occasion. For this reason the corona was photographed in
