Notes

Abstract

WE regret to have to announce the death, on Good Friday, at the Nice Observatory, of M. Thollon, the eminent spectroscopist. Few men devoted to spectroscopic inquiry have worked so unceasingly and successfully; and in him Science loses one of the most single-minded of her votaries. He has been cut off in the midst of his labours, which, especially since his location at M. Bischoffsheim's magnificent observatory and the completion of the spectroscopic installation there, have borne such rich fruit in the shape of a method of sorting out the telluric from the true solar lines (a method slightly modified by Cornu), and of a map of the solar spectrum as observed by the new form of spectroscope of his own invention, which vastly surpasses in dispersion and purity of image anything that preceded it. Dr. Thollon has not only worked at Nice, but at the Pic du Midi and the Paris Observatory; he was also one of the observers of the total solar eclipse in Egypt in 1882. In all his wanderings, as in his work, he made many friends, and all who knew him will mourn his loss, not only as a man of science, but as one possessing, above the ordinary degree, a true and genial nature.