An eclipse of the Sun seems to be referred to by Gregorius Turonensis, when he says[70] that:—“Then even the Sun appeared hideous, so that scarcely a third part of it gave light, I believe on account of such deeds of wickedness and shedding of innocent blood.” This would seem to have been the eclipse which occurred on February 24, 453 A.D., when Attila and the Huns were ravaging Italy, and to them it was doubtless that the writer alluded. At Rome three-fourths of the Sun’s disc would have been eclipsed at sunset, a finding which tallies fairly with the statement of Gregorius. It is not till far into the 6th century that we come upon a native English record of an eclipse of the Sun as having been observed in England. This deficiency in our national annals is thus judiciously explained and commented on by our clever and talented American authoress.[71] Speaking of the eclipse of February 15, 538 A.D., she says:—“The accounts, however, are greatly confused and uncertain, as would perhaps be natural fully 60 years before the advent of St. Augustine, and when Britain was helplessly harassed with its continual struggle in the fierce hands of West Saxons and East Saxons, of Picts and conquering Angles. Men have little time to record celestial happenings clearly, much less to indulge in scientific comment and theorising upon natural phenomena, when the history of a nation sways to and fro with the tide of battle, and what is gained to-day may be fatally lost to-morrow. And so there is little said about this eclipse, and that little is more vague and uncertain even than the monotonous plaints of Gildas—the one writer whom Britain has left us, in his meagre accounts of the conquest of Kent, and the forsaken walls and violated shrines of this early epoch.” The well-known _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_[72] is our authority for this eclipse having been noted in England, but the record is bare indeed:—“In this year the Sun was eclipsed 14 days before the Calends of March from early morning till 9 a.m.” Tycho Brahe, borrowing from Calvisius, who borrowed from somebody else, says that the eclipse happened “in the 5th year of Henry, King of the West Saxons, at the 1st hour of the day till nearly the 3rd, or immediately after sunrise.” Johnson finds that at London nearly three-fourths of the Sun’s disc was covered at 7.43 a.m.