PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. XC1. 



gales. Complete skeletons are rare, though small portions of 

 them are much more often met with. 



ASTRONOMY. 



The astronomical subject which has come most prominently 

 forward in the past twelve months is, doubtless, the comet 

 discovered by Professor Morehouse on September ist, and this 

 not on account of its brightness, for, though it has been stated 

 to be visible to the naked eye, I think that most people 

 have only seen it through a telescope. The chief feature 

 has been the extraordinary character of its tail, which 

 varied perpetually in shape, and was sometimes marked by 

 a series of bright nebulous masses travelling along its length 

 away from the nucleus ; sometimes it was undulating in shape 

 and generally consisted of several streamers, either straight or 

 occasionally curved. These appearances were much less obvious 

 to the eye than in photographs, one of which shows a tail 

 27,000,000 miles in length. Most of the lines in the spectrum 

 of this comet belong to a gas, which presents a system of bands 

 not identified with any known spectrum. On February 22nd, at 

 7.30 p.m., a meteor of exceptional brightness was seen all over 

 the south of England, the most extraordinary feature being the 

 trail which it left in the sky, which took the form of an irregular 

 band of light moving slowly and altering in shape and forming a 

 most striking object across the heavens. This band did not 

 entirely fade away for about two hours, and was certainly quite 

 bright for more than half-an-hour after the meteor had fallen. It 

 then, as I saw it, stretched from near the constellation Perseus, 

 through Gemini to near Pleiades, where it curved round and 

 .came straight below Orion to Sirius. It gradually drifted north- 

 ward. I, unfortunately, did not see the meteor itself. The 

 latest theory of sunspots is that they are fields of magnetic force, 

 but little appears to be really known about them. The expedition 

 from the Lick Observatory to Flint Island to observe the 

 eclipse of January 3rd, 1908, amongst other investigations, took 



