OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 25 



Dr. Samuel Kneeland was elected Recording Secretary, in 

 place of Dr. B. A. Gould, who resigned. 



Three liundred and seventy-second meeting. 



December 7, 1852. — Monthly Meeting. 



The President in the chair. 



Professor Winlock, of Kentucky, made a verbal report on 

 errors he had discovered in Bradley's and Bessel's Observa- 

 tions on the sun, illustrated by diagrams. 



Professor Peirce observed that this was a very remarkable 

 application of the method of least squares, leading to the dis- 

 covery of such a small difference between the printed obser- 

 vations and the true result. He gave other examples of the 

 detection of errors by the application of this method, showing 

 that even errors are regulated by laws. He remarked, that, 

 with all our accuracy, the diameter of the sun is not yet 

 known ; the best way to ascertain this is by an eclipse, but 

 even this is open to doubts. 



Professor Peirce alluded to several errors attributed to him 

 in some foreign journals ; — the idea that the orbit of the comet 

 of 16S9 was the same as that of 1843 had been erroneously 

 attributed to him. He believed also that astronomers will 

 yet acknowledge that there are two solutions to the perturb- 

 ing actions of Neptune on Uranus. 



Dr. J. Wyman offered some remarks on the internal struc- 

 ture of the cranium of the mastodon. He had compared the 

 foramina through which the nerves escape from the cranial 

 cavity with those in the skull of the elephant ; those trans- 

 mitting the trigeminus and facial nerves were of similar pro- 

 portions in the two, and tended to show that the mastodon, as 

 well as the elephant, was provided with a trunk, the large 

 size of the nerves indicating a corresponding development of 

 muscular fibre and of sensitive surface in the face. 



The form of the cranial cavity, which has not been de- 

 scribed, corresponded with the extraordinary type met with in 



VOL. III. 4 



