From the terrace of the country house of the hospitable Mayor, a farm transformed into an observatory by our learned friend, Count de la Baume Pluvinel, there were no obstacles between ourselves and any part of the sky or landscape. The whole horizon lay before us. In front was a town of Arab aspect framed in a lovely oasis of palm-trees; a little farther off, the blue sea beyond the shores of Alicante and Murcia: on the other side a belt of low mountains, and near us fields and gardens. A Company of the Civic Guard kept order, and prevented the entrance of too many curious visitors, of whom over ten thousand had arrived. At the moment when the first contact of the lunar disk with the solar disk was observed in the telescope, we fired a gun, in order to announce the precise commencement of the occultation to the 40,000 persons who were awaiting the phenomenon, and to discover what difference would exist between this telescopic observation and those made with the unaided eyes (protected simply by a bit of smoked glass) of so many improvised spectators. This had already been done by Arago at Perpignan in 1842. The verification was almost immediate for the majority of eyes, and may be estimated at eight or ten seconds. So that the commencement of the eclipse was confirmed almost as promptly for the eye as with the astronomical instruments. The sky was splendidly clear; no cloud, no mist, deep blue; blazing Sun. The first period of the eclipse showed nothing particular. It is only from the moment when more than half the solar disk is covered by the lunar disk that the phenomenon is imposing in its grandeur. At this phase, I called the attention of the people standing in the court to the visibility of the stars, and indicating the place of Venus in the sky asked if any with long sight could perceive her. Eight at once responded in the affirmative. It should be said that the planet was at that time at its period of maximum brilliancy, when for observers blessed with good sight, it is always visible to the unaided eye. When some three-quarters of the Sun were eclipsed, the pigeons which had flown back to the farm huddled into a corner, and made no further movement. They told me that evening that the fowls had done the same a little later, returning to the hen-house as though it had been night, and that the small children (who were very numerous at Elche, where the population is certainly not diminishing) left off their games, and came back to their mothers' skirts. The birds flew anxiously to their nests. The ants in one garden were excessively agitated, no doubt disconcerted in their strategics. The bats came out. A few days before the eclipse I had prepared the inhabitants of this part of Spain for the observation of the phenomenon by the following description, which sums up the previous accounts of the astronomers: