Abstract
III. THE eclipse of 1882 is now over, and it is not too much to say that the observations have been most successful. Much more work has apparently been done in former eclipses, but it has been of a far more general nature, and, as the old saw has it, dolus latet in generalibus. This year the work has put on very much more of a quantitative look, and each observation therefore more or less means a real step in advance. And indeed the time had come when this should be so, for day by day the quantity of laboratory work done which can be more or less compared with eclipse observations is increasing, and in the case of general observations either in one case or the other comparisons are impossible. I have taken many prior occasions of insisting upon this point; but perhaps the reason why this principle has been so generally acted upon on the present occasion has been a capital example set to future eclipse parties. Some days before the eclipse there was a regular Congress of the leaders of the different expeditions and the chief observers, held under the presidency of Mahmoud Pacha, the astronomer at Cairo, and not only was the general plan of observations agreed upon but the necessity of a limited field of inquiry was generally acknowledged; hence at the moment of the eclipse each worker had only a limited part of the spectrum to study, and the instrument to be employed whatever its form, and there were many forms employed, was carefully prepared for this part, and this part only, before totality.
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LOCKYER, J. Eclipse Notes 1 . Nature 26, 100–101 (1882). https://doi.org/10.1038/026100a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/026100a0