xcii. PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



photographs during totality with a view to finding an intra- 

 Mercurial planet. Three hundred star images down to the ninth 

 magnitude were recorded, but were all identified with known stars, 

 so that it is considered proved that if any such planet exists it is 

 far too small to account for the perturbations observed in Mer- 

 cury, which must, therefore, be due to some other cause. Four 

 hundred and thirty-six canals and 186 oases are now known on 

 Mars, the canals varying in width from three to twenty miles and 

 in length from 250 miles to 3,450 miles, so that if they are really 

 of an artificial nature they represent an enormous amount of 

 work, and suggest that the dwellers in Mars are either very 

 numerous or very large, or have forces at their disposal at present 

 unknown to us. It has not been possible yet to determine 

 exactly the orbit of the eighth satellite of Jupiter discovered last 

 year, but it has probably a retrograde motion, a period of two 

 years, and an inclination of 31 degrees to the ecliptic. An 

 almost incredible delicacy of instruments is involved in the 

 measurement of the temperature of stars, that of Arcturus being 

 equal to the heat of a candle at the distance of six miles if there 

 were no absorption by the atmosphere, and of Vega half the 

 amount. These measurements were carried out at the Yerkes 

 Observatory. 



METEOROLOGY. 



Meteorologists and others will be interested in a lecture on 

 " The Dawn of Meteorology," delivered before the Royal 

 Meteorological Society and published in their quarterly journal, 

 which shows from what early times the subject was studied, more 

 often in connection with omens and signs than in the matter-of- 

 fact methods of the present day. However, in the first century, 

 A.D., observations on rainfall were made in Palestine, which are 

 still preserved, and from which we find that the amount of 

 rainfall considered necessary for a good crop was much the same 

 as at the present day, and that the climate is, therefore, probably 

 much the same as it was 1,900 years ago. The Commonwealth 

 Bureau of Meteorology of Australia has just issued its first 



