Our first century: being a popular descriptive portraiture of the one hundred great and memorable events of perpetual interest in the history of our country, political, military, mechanical, social, scientific and commercial: embracing also delineations of all the great historic characters celebrated in the annals of the republic; men of heroism, statesmanship, genius, oratory, adventure and philanthropy . our or five secondshad elapsed, and the eclipse had sensiblyincreased. As the eclipse advanced, theredid not appear to be so great a diminutionof the light as was generally expected, andit w
Our first century: being a popular descriptive portraiture of the one hundred great and memorable events of perpetual interest in the history of our country, political, military, mechanical, social, scientific and commercial: embracing also delineations of all the great historic characters celebrated in the annals of the republic; men of heroism, statesmanship, genius, oratory, adventure and philanthropy . our or five secondshad elapsed, and the eclipse had sensiblyincreased. As the eclipse advanced, theredid not appear to be so great a diminutionof the light as was generally expected, andit was not until the sun was nearly cov-ered, that the darkness was very thirty-seven minutes and thirty secondspast eleven oolock, the suns surface waswholly covered. The last ray of light fromthe suns limb disappeared whole of the moon was then seen sur-rounded by a luminous appearance of con-siderable extent, such as had generallybeen noticed in total eclipses of the luminosity, with a twilight bright-ness round the horizon, prevented thedarkness from being any greater than itwas, during the time that the suns sur-face remained wholly covered. The de-gree of light can be estimated, on such anoccasion, by the number of stars visible tothe naked eye ; those noticed at this timewere Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius, Procyon,the three bright stars in the belt of Orion,. and the star a in its shoulder. Venusand Mars were also visible. A candle hadbeen provided to assist in reading off theseconds from the chronometer, but, thoughit was not found necessary in the gardenwhere these observations were made, itwould have been in the house adjoining. As the time drew near for witnessing theend of the total darkness, there was no-ticed a visible increase of light in the at-mosphere for about two seconds before anypart of the suns limb was visible in thetelescope; but at thirty-two minutes andeighteen seconds past eleven oclock—thetime noted as that of the
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, bookpublishersprin, bookyear1876
