Sir John Herschel, writing to his venerable aunt, relates that when the brilliant red flames burst into view behind the dark moon on the morning of the 8th of July, 1842, the populace of Milan, with the usual inconsequence of a crowd, raised the shout, "_Es leben die Astronomen!_"[175] In reality, none were less prepared for their apparition than the class to whom the applause due to the magnificent spectacle was thus adjudged. And in some measure through their own fault, for many partial hints and some distinct statements from earlier observers had given unheeded notice that some such phenomenon might be expected to attend a solar eclipse. What we now call the "chromosphere" is an envelope of glowing gases, by which the sun is completely covered, and from which the "prominences" are emanations, eruptive or flame-like. Now, continual indications of the presence of this fire-ocean had been detected during eclipses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Captain Stannyan, describing in a letter to Flamsteed an occurrence of the kind witnessed by him at Berne on May 1 (o.s.), 1706, says that the sun's "getting out of the eclipse was preceded by a blood-red streak of light from its left limb."[176] A precisely similar appearance was noted by both Halley and De Louville in 1715; during annular eclipses by Lord Aberdour in 1737,[177] and by Short in 1748,[178] the tint of the ruby border being, however, subdued to "brown" or "dusky red" by the surviving sunlight; while observations identical in character were made at Amsterdam in 1820,[179] at Edinburgh by Henderson in 1836, and at New York in 1838.[180]