ABSTRACT
MISS ELIZilETH BROWN .-The Tirnes of March 18 eays :-English astronomy has sustained a heavy lass in the sudden death, on March 5, of Miss Elizabeth Brown, of Further Barton, Cirencester. Miss Brown was one of the most eminent of our lady astronomers, and a representative of the highest type of amateur. Owing to her retiring and unassuming character, her observations, carried on with unwearied persistency,' were little known until she was induced in 1883 to become the director cf the section for the observation of the sun in connection with the then flourishing Liverpool Astronomical Society. The decline of that society some years later was a great disappJintment to her, and she frequently advocated the formation of a new organisation upon a securer basis. The British Astronomical Association, founded by Mr. E. Walter Maunder in 1890, enlisted ber sympatbies from the first, and she became one of its most devoted sup-
porters, filling a similar position in it to that which sbe bad held in tbe Liverpool Society. Her artistic skill and perfect accuracy ren der her sun-spot drawinas of the higbest value and mll,de her an admirable di~ector for the solar section. "\Vbilst filling this office sbe brougbt out seven annual reports on the cbanges of tbe solar surface, each of wbich reports iovolved an immense amount of personal labour, undertaken most cbeerfully, witbout the slightest desire-for distinctiol1 or farne. Though her health, by nb means robust. forbade her undertaking severe nigbt observation and· obliged her to make the sun her cbief object of study, sbe was a useful and careful observer in the sections of tbe Association devoted to the study of the moon, of tbe colours of . stars, and of variable stars. N or was her work confined to England. On three occasions she undertook long journeys to observe total eclipses of the sun: in 1887 to Kineshma, near Moscow. in Russia; in 1889 to Trinidad, in the West Indies; and in 1896 to Vadsö, in Lapland, and she was preparing to observe the eclipse of May, 1900, in Spain or Algeria. The accounts of the first two of these expeditions, which she priblished in coojunction with her sister, under the titles of "In Pursuit of a. Shadow," aod "Caught in the Tropics," are models of bright and unaffected narration.
