"Saith the Lord God, I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day," and seems to refer to the fact that the eclipse of 831 B.C. occurred about midday in Judæa. Later Micah writes-- "The sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark over them." Isaiah says that the "sun shall be darkened in his going forth," and Jeremiah that "her sun is gone down while it was yet day." Whilst Ezekiel says-- "I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not give her light. All the bright lights of heaven will I make dark over thee, and set darkness upon thy land, saith the Lord God." But a total eclipse is not all darkness and terror; it has a beauty and a glory all its own. Scarcely has the dark moon hidden the last thread of sunlight from view, than spurs of rosy light are seen around the black disc that now fills the place so lately occupied by the glorious king of day. And these rosy spurs of light shine on a background of pearly glory, as impressive in its beauty as the swift march of the awful shadow, and the seeming descent of the darkened heavens, were in terror. There it shines, pure, lovely, serene, radiant with a light like molten silver, wreathing the darkened sun with a halo like that round a saintly head in some noble altar-piece; so that while in some cases the dreadful shadow has awed a laughing and frivolous crowd into silence, in others the radiance of that halo has brought spectators to their knees with an involuntary exclamation, "The Glory!" as if God Himself had made known His presence in the moment of the sun's eclipse. And this, indeed, seems to have been the thought of both the Babylonians and Egyptians of old. Both nations had a specially sacred symbol to set forth the Divine Presence--the Egyptians, a disc with long outstretched wings; the Babylonians, a ring with wings. The latter symbol on Assyrian monuments is always shown as floating over the head of the king, and is designed to indicate the presence and protection of the Deity. [Illustration: THE ASSYRIAN "RING WITH WINGS."] We may take it for granted that the Egyptians and Chaldeans of old, as modern astronomers to-day, had at one time or another presented to them every type of coronal form. But there would, no doubt, be a difficulty in grasping or remembering the irregular details of the corona as seen in most eclipses. Sometimes, however, the corona shows itself in a striking and simple form--when sun-spots are few in number, it spreads itself out in two great equatorial streamers. At the eclipse of Algiers in 1900, already referred to, one observer who watched the eclipse from the sea, said-- "The sky was blue all round the sun, and the effect of the silvery corona projected on it was beyond any one to describe. I can only say it seemed to me what angels' wings will be like."[129:1] [Illustration: CORONA OF MINIMUM TYPE.