Very many of the ancient eclipses have been of great use to the historian in verifying dates, and mathematical astronomers have employed them in correcting the lunar tables, or intricate mathematical data by which the motion of the moon is predicted. Coming down to the middle of the sixth century, we find the first eclipse recorded in England, in the "Saxon Chronicle," A. D. 538. During the epoch of the Arabian Nights several eclipses were witnessed at Bagdad, A. D. 829 to 928, and many a century later by Ibu-Jounis, court astronomer of Hakem, the Caliph of Egypt. Nothing is more interesting than to search the quaint records of these ancient eclipses. One occurring in 1560, when Tycho Brahe was but fourteen, had much to do with turning his permanent interest toward mathematics and astronomy. The eclipse of 1612 was the first "seen through a tube," the telescope having been invented only a few years before. "Paradise Lost" was completed about 1665, and the censorship was still in existence; and it is matter of record that the oft-quoted passage, "As when the Sun, new risen, Looks through the horizontal misty air, Shorn of his beams; or from behind the Moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs." _P. L._, i. 594 was strongly urged as sufficient reason for suppressing the entire epic. London was favored with the outflashing corona, May 3, 1715, and a pamphlet was issued in prediction, entitled "The Black Day, or a Prospect of Doomsday." The first American eclipse expedition was on occasion of the totality of Oct. 27, 1780, sent out by Harvard College and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences under Professor Samuel Williams to Penobscot. There was a fine total eclipse from Albany to Boston on June 16, 1806, and many important observations of it were made in this country. But it was not till the European eclipse of 1842 that research got fully under way, because the germ of the new astronomy, particularly as applied to the sun, had begun its development; and the significance of the corona was obvious, if it could be proved a true appendage of the sun. Photography had not long been discovered, and the corona of 1851 was the first to be automatically registered on a daguerreotype. In 1860 it was proved that prominences and corona both belong to the sun and not to the moon.