22 ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 



made with a meridian instrument nearly every fair night in 

 the year with the aid of the chronograph. 



Professor Langley expects his establishment to be more 

 and more confined in the future to the duties of a physical 

 observatory, and occupied less with the cataloguing of the 

 stars than with the study of the physical constitution of the 

 heavenly bodies, especially that of the sun. 



CEBIT OF JUPITEK. 



Le Verrier announces that having considered, in Chapter 

 XVIII. of his Astronomical Researches^ the inequalities of 

 Jupiter and Saturn in so far as they mutually depend on each 

 other, and in Chapter XIX. the secular variations of the ele- 

 ments of the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, 

 he now presents to the Academy of Sciences at Paris the 

 complete theory of the motion of Jupiter, constituting Chap- 

 ter XX. of hisi?6searcAes. 6 B, 1873, 678. 



newcomb's catalogue cf fundamental staes. 



The United States Xaval Observatory has published, as 

 an appendix to the volume of Washington observations for 

 1870, a recent research by Professor Newcomb, resulting in 

 a catalogue of the positions of thirty-two fundamental stars. 

 This work is specially interesting as giving the first published 

 results arrived at by Auwers, of Berlin, in his new reduction 

 of the invaluable observations made by Bradley, at Green- 

 wich, in the middle of the last century. The right ascensions 

 adopted by Newcomb depend especially on the meridian ob- 

 servations made at Greenwich, Palermo, Konigsberg, Dorpat, 

 Abo, Poulkova, and Washington, in which selection is recog- 

 nized a wise discrimination in favor of using only the work 

 of the acknowledged standard meridian instruments. The 

 object of the investigation of Professor Newcomb has been 

 especially to obtain results as free as joossible from any pe- 

 riodic or systematic error, and he has handled his material 

 in an original manner. Having newer and, in some respects, 

 far better data than that used by Dr. Gould in compiling his 

 standard right ascensions. Professor Newcomb's results will 

 probably be accepted as of the highest value. The memoir 

 concludes with full tables of the mean places of the stars for 

 each fifth vear from 1750 to 1900. 



