366 
derstand, or that I had not the true inspiration, as, certainly, 
they paid not the slightest regard to the notice to ses which 
I then gave them. es 
‘* Martin, in his Tour to the Western Isles, says, heidi the 
ancient race of the Island of Rona was, about the year 1700, 
all destroyed in the following manner :—First, a swarm of 
rats, none knows how, came into the island and eat up all the 
corn. In the next place, some seamen landed and robbed 
them (the people) of what provisions they had left, and all 
died before the usual time of the arrival of the boat from 
Lewis.” 
- 
The President read a paper on the probable errors of the 
eye and ear in transit observations. 
«« Among the important applications of the Electric Tele- 
graph which every day is producing, none is more interesting to 
those who pursue physical inquiries than its power of making 
time-determinations with a precision and facility which pro- 
mise ere long to supersede the existing processes. In its very 
first application to determine longitudes by making the clock 
of each station beat its time at the other, its immeasurable 
superiority was at once revealed; and though it has not been 
as completely established in the more ordinary operations of 
the Observatory, yet that is only an affair of a few years. 
One of these seems specially to invite it,—the determination of 
right ascension; and already Mitchel and, I believe, others 
have obtained results which appear to surpass those hitherto 
obtained by the transit instrument. 
‘* The principle is this: the clock, by a well-known appa- 
ratus, prints on some fit surface a series of equidistant dots 
by the successive vibrations of its pendulum. Between any 
pair of these the observer can interpose a dot at the instant of 
a phenomenon, and its place, with respect to them, gives the 
time. This reduction can be made at leisure, as the record is 
permanent, and a scale of any reasonable magnitude can be 
