Be it called what it may, however--eclipse or transit--we were disappointed in not getting a glimpse of the phenomenon in question on the present occasion. Although duly at our post from before sunrise till the minute calculated for the last contact of the planet with the solar disc, we were unable to obtain anything more than the most momentary blink even of the larger orb, and, of course, the detection of the black button-like disc of the planet itself, in such circumstances, was altogether out of the question. The disappointment, however, was less annoying to us in this instance from the fact that we had already been privileged to witness all the phases of a similar conjunction from first to last on the 12th November 1861. The next visible transit of Mercury does not take place till the 6th of May 1878--ten years hence. There are several other transits during the present century, invisible in our country, however, and on the continent of Europe; but which will probably afford much delight to many an eager watcher over the length and breadth of the South American continent, and generally over the islands of the Pacific Ocean.
Nor, with us here at least, was the night of the 13-14th instant any way more favourable for observation than the dull beclouded morning of the 5th itself. The night was calm and rainless, to be sure, but a heavy impenetrable mass of dark grey clouds, so low as to envelop all the mountain summits around, obscured the vault from horizon to horizon, from sunset to sunrise, so that not a single meteor could be seen by the keenest eye, even if above that pall of cloud the display had been the most brilliant and splendid conceivable. From the fact, however, that in several places widely distant from each other, from which we have had communications on the subject, and where the sky was abundantly clear and unclouded throughout, no unusual display of meteors was seen, the probability is that we have on this occasion missed them in our country, either because they came into contact with our atmosphere in the daytime, when, of course, they would be invisible, or more likely because our contact this year with the meteorolithic annulus was of the slightest, and at a segment thereof where the meteoric bodies are least numerous, and thus we must patiently wait till we again dash through it at its densest before we can hope for such a magnificent meteor shower as astonished and delighted us all in 1866. Only at Oxford, as far as our country is concerned, was there anything like a meteor shower on the present occasion, and even there the display seems to have been too faint and uninteresting to have attracted much attention. Intelligence has reached our country from New York, however, that over that city, and over the States generally, the meteoric display of the morning of the 14th was very splendid indeed, though, owing to the morning being further advanced before it commenced, less of it was seen by the people at large than on some previous occasions. The weather with our Transatlantic cousins seems to have been all that could be desired, as it is stated that "astronomers and others were able to make very complete observations." The worst thing about our insular position with respect to matters astronomical is the extreme uncertainty with which anything like continuous observation can be conducted. The chances always are twenty to one that in Great Britain, at any given hour in any given place, the weather should be such as to render an observation of a celestial phenomenon impossible, or at the least partial and unsatisfactory. One thing, at least, is now pretty certain--that annually, and at a date that falls somewhere between sunset of the 13th and sunrise of the 14th November, we may confidently look for greater or less displays of these meteoric bodies, the only thing likely to interfere with the interesting pyrotechnic exhibition being an unfavourable state of the weather at a moment when we are most concerned that the sky shall be clear and cloudless.