1888.] President's Address. 51 



Committee in regard to personal attendance at long meetings, there 

 would probably be more expenditure of time in the way of corres- 

 pondence, and it was thought that one meeting of the General 

 Committee in the year would in most cases suffice. To meet pressing 

 cases in the interval, it was suggested that a limited sum might be 

 placed by the General Committee at the disposal of the Council of 

 the Royal Society. There are further provisions for forming a 

 reserve fund of not more than 2,000 to meet special objects involv- 

 ing unusual expenditure, and for holding in reserve out of the money 

 available for any one year enough to meet annual grants of limited 

 amount made for a period not exceeding three years, the future grants 

 being contingent on the receipt by the Committee of satisfactory 

 evidence of progress in the inquiry. The new regulations, of which 

 I have merely given a slight sketch, have been communicated to the 

 Treasury, and will come into operation next year. 



The Krakatoa Committee have now completed their work, and the 

 volume which is the outcome of their labours is in the hands of the 

 public. It has been favourably noticed in more than one quarter. 

 The Society is much indebted to those Fellows and other gentlemen 

 who discussed and reported on the different subjects into which the 

 whole inquiry was divided, and to Mr. Symons, who was the first 

 to propose that the materials should be collected, and to whose 

 unwearied labour as Chairman of the Committee, director of the 

 correspondence, and editor of the volume, the successful accomplish- 

 ment of the undertaking is largely due. A comprehensive and 

 digested account of that extraordinary volcanic explosion, remarkable 

 both for its magnitude and the striking disturbances and other 

 phenomena attending or following it, is now placed within easy 

 reach of the ordinary reader, and will go down to posterity, whereas, 

 had the various accounts remained in their isolated form, they would 

 many of them have perished, and the remainder could not have 

 been brought together without a most laborious search. It must be a 

 great satisfaction to my predecessor in this chair to remember that 

 he urged upon the Council the importance of collecting the facts 

 before the materials should have become dissipated, and while the 

 freshness of men's recollection of the event kept up a lively interest 

 in all that belonged to it. 



The Royal Society is in possession of some important standards for 

 the safe keeping of which we are responsible. Parliamentary copies 

 of the standard yard and standard pound have been entrusted to our 

 custody ; and we have also a standard measure of length known as 

 Sir George Schuckburgh's scale, with reference to which the length of 

 the seconds' pendulum for Greenwich has been determined by Kater 

 and Sabine. This length, as determined by experiment, has been 

 defined with reference to the interval .from the to the 39 and 



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