An able astronomer, who was the chief of the party at Oakland, and who owing to his station being very near the southern edge of the shadow, saw them for fifteen or twenty seconds, says that they presented most clearly the phenomena which he should expect to be caused by the irregular contour of the moon, when its indentations were exaggerated by irradiation.
No discoveries of equal importance with M. Janssen's last year have yet been reported; but as no eclipse has ever been so thoroughly observed, the results cannot fail, when thoroughly collected and compared, to be of great scientific value.
RELIGION IN PRISONS.[27]
For the last quarter of a century, a society has existed in this city entitled the "Prison Association of New York." It counts among its members a large number of the wealthy and influential men of the State. Its object is to improve our prison systems and to effect as far as possible the permanent reformation of our criminals. With so humane and Christian an object we most heartily sympathize.
Its Twenty-fourth Annual Report, which we recently received, is a very interesting and comprehensive document. Accompanying it is a circular in which we are told that the association desires "that the public attention may be directed to this question, and the public sentiment in relation to it enlightened and invigorated, so that our prison systems and our administration of criminal justice may everywhere be improved and brought into harmony with the advancing civilization of the age."
We shall, therefore, offer a few suggestions on this subject.
A criminal is a man morally diseased. As such he should be considered—as such be treated. In a right prison system, the punishment of past offences should be but the secondary object; the prevention of future offences, the main one. No permanent outward change can be effected till an inward reformation has been wrought; and that reformation must come through mental but especially through moral development.
We learn from this report, with much pleasure, that, in the prisons of the chief States, libraries have been established; and that, in many of them, instruction is regularly imparted to the inmates, through classes and lectures. Ignorance is a fruitful source of vice. The Catholic Church, which alone raised the world from the intellectual darkness into which, at the fall of the Roman empire, the inpouring of northern barbarians had plunged her, stands to-day the foremost champion of enlightened Christian education. She regards knowledge as an aid to virtue. She courts the light of science, that in its beams the truth of her dogmas may appear with brighter resplendence.
But experience has clearly shown that virtue is not a necessary consequence of education—that moral does not always follow mental development. To prove this, we need not go outside of this report, in which, page 373, we read the following words of Amos Pilsbury, "the Nestor of jailers on this continent; an officer whose name is almost as well known in Europe as it is in America":