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Rh at all, the exposure proving insufficient to bring it out. Of course, this makes it extremely probable that what looks like the corona upon plates exposed to the uneclipsed sun is merely a fallacious ghost, due, as his opponents have always claimed, to something in his apparatus or process, or else to the scattered light in our atmosphere.

It is true, as Mr. Common points out, that the air was by no means satisfactorily clear during the eclipse, and the result, therefore, is not absolutely conclusive; but it must be conceded, and Mr. Huggins himself admits it, that the probability is now heavily against him.

Captain Darwin obtained good pictures of the corona with ordinary plates exposed for a longer time in the usual apparatus.

October 1, 1886.



HE occasion of M. Chevreul's completing the one hundredth year of his age was celebrated in Paris on the 30th and 31st of August, with appropriate observances and honors. The festivities were begun in the National Society of Agriculture, whose custom it has been to elect M. Chevreul its president every other year. A committee of this society had been formed in April, under the presidency of M. Charles Brongniart, and had collected the sum of fifteen thousand francs for the purpose of striking a commemorative medal for the centenary. Addresses were delivered by Deputy Louis Passy, and, in presenting the medal, by M. Brongniart, who assured M. Chevreul that he was the object of the respect and admiration of all civilized nations. M. Chevreul replied; "All that I have heard causes me much embarrassment. And why? On account of the warmth of the profound and numerous sentiments which you have expressed. I never anticipated the honor that my comrades have paid me."

In the Academy of Sciences, whose regular meeting took place on the 30th, M. Blanchard, in the absence from Paris of President Admiral Jurien de la Gravière, took the chair and made the Academy's address. He remarked upon the session's occurring on that day, as if the hour had been chosen for the event, saying that "in the family it is on the eve of the marked day that the festival is given: was it not fitting that it should be the same in the Academy, our intellectual family, which we love more and more as we grow older?" He referred to the fact that he had, as President of the Academy, predicted this very event three years before, when M. Chevreul was entering upon his ninety-eighth year. Then, having made a general mention of the value of M. Chevreul's discoveries, he said: "The investigator, absorbed in his mission, dreams of nothing but of extending its domain. If he succeeds in unveiling facts of considerable 