7'2- Proceedings. 



Ordinary Meeting, January 24th, 1893. 



Professor Arthur Schuster, Ph.D., F.R.S., F.R.A.S., 

 President, in the Chair. 



The thanks of the members were voted to the donors of 

 the books upon the table. 



Mr. F. J. Faraday, F.L.S., called attention to a paper 

 by Dr. Ferdinand Cohn, read before the Breslau Kaiser- 

 lichen Leopoldinisch-Carolinischen Akademie der Natur- 

 forscher on November 15, 1856, and published in Part i, 

 Vol. XXVI. of the Verhandlmige7i, describing the effects of 

 lightning strokes on pine trees. The special observations 

 referred to were that the stroke either attacks the summit 

 of the tree, or some conspicuous point lower down the 

 trunk ; that the main current is conducted through the 

 cambial layer ; that the bark and bast are blown off by the 

 sudden heating and vaporisation of the moisture in the 

 cambium cells ; that the stripping of the bark is not 

 necessarily an indication of the course of the current, but 

 occurs only in those places where the bark offers the least 

 resistance to the force of the explosion ; that the splitting 

 of the tree and stripping of the bark tend to take a spiral 

 direction in conformity with the spiral growth of the tree ; 

 that all trees may be struck, but that some are struck more 

 frequently than others ; and that the effects of the stroke 

 depend rather on the intensity of the current than on the 

 nature of the tree. A case was mentioned where a huge 

 splinter from the summit of a pine tree was found in a cleft 

 of the lower part of the trunk produced by the same stroke, 

 indicating that the current passed more rapidly than the 

 splinter fell. 



Professor F. E. Weiss gave an account of Mr. Tonesco's 



