Eclipses, like comets, have always been interpreted as the indication of inevitable calamities. Human vanity sees the finger of God making signs to us on the least pretext, as if we were the end and aim of universal creation. Let us mention, for example, what passed even in France, with reference to the announcement of an eclipse of the sun, on August 21, 1560. For one, it presaged a great overthrow of States and the ruin of Rome; for another, it implied another universal deluge; for a third, nothing less would result than a conflagration of the globe; finally, for the less excited, it would infect the air. The belief in these terrible effects was so general that, by the express order of the doctors, a multitude of frightened people shut themselves up in very close cellars, well heated and perfumed, in order to shelter themselves from these evil influences. Petit relates that the decisive moment approached, that the consternation was at its height, and that a parish priest of the country, being no longer able to confess his parishioners, who believed their last hour had come, was obliged to tell them in a sermon “not to be so much hurried, seeing that, on account of the wealth of the penitents, the eclipse had been postponed for a fortnight.” These good parishioners found no more difficulty in believing in the postponement of the eclipse than they had in believing in its unlucky influence. History relates a crowd of memorable acts on which eclipses have had the greatest influence. Alexander, before the battle of Arbela, expected to see his army routed by the appearance of a phenomenon of this kind. The death of the Athenian general Nicias and the ruin of his army in Sicily, with which the decline of the Athenians commenced, had for their cause an eclipse of the moon. We know how Christopher Columbus, with his little army, threatened with death by famine at Jamaica, found means of procuring provisions from the natives by depriving them in the evening of the light of the moon. The eclipse had scarcely commenced when they supplied him with food. This was the eclipse of March 1, 1504. We need not relate other facts of this nature, in which history abounds, and which are known to every one. Eclipses no longer cause terror to any one, since we know that they are a natural and inevitable consequence of the combined motions of the three great celestial bodies--the sun, the earth, and the moon; especially since we know that these motions are regular and permanent, and that we can predict, by means of calculation, the eclipses which will be produced in the future as well as recognize those which have occurred in the past. The following description of the total eclipse of 1860 will be found interesting. Mr. Lowe, who observed it at Santander, Spain, thus writes: