472 Anniversary Meeting. [Dec. 1, 



has accordingly been appointed, and has held several meetings, and 

 examined several witnesses ; but the subject is a wide one, and the 

 committee have not yet brought their labours to a close. 



The proceedings of to-day bring to an end my long tenure of office 

 in the Royal Society, which has extended now over thirty-six years, 

 during the last five of which I have held the honourable office of 

 your President. I am deeply sensible of the kindness which I haA'e 

 always experienced from the Fellows, and of the indulgence with 

 which they have overlooked my deficiencies, due, in part, to the 

 pressure of other work. It cannot be without a strong feeling of 

 regret that I come to the close of an official connexion with the 

 Society that has now extended over full half my life. But I feel 

 that it is time that I should make way for others, and that I should 

 not wait for those infirmities which advancing years so often bring in 

 their train ; besides which there are personal reasons which led me 

 to request the members of the Council not to vote for my nomination 

 for re-election as your President. 



And now it only remains to me, as virtually my last official act as 

 your President, to perform, the pleasing duty of delivering the medals 

 which the Society has to award to the respective recipients of those 

 honours. 



The Copley Medal has been awarded to our Foreign Member, Pro- 

 fessor Simon Newcomb, who has been engaged during the last thirty 

 years in a series of important researches, which have contributed 

 greatly to the progress of gravitational astronomy. Among his 

 labours in this field may be mentioned his able discussion of the 

 mutual relations of the orbits of the Asteroids, with reference to 

 Gibers' hypothesis, that they were formed by the breaking up of a 

 ring of nebulous matter, his discussion of the orbits of Uranus and 

 Neptune, and of the orbit of the Moon. Recently he has turned his 

 attention to Saturn's satellites, and has investigated the remarkable 

 action of Titan on Hyperion. For many years back he has chiefly 

 been engaged in perfecting the tables of the Moon; and in his 

 important work, " Researches on the Motion of the Moon," he 

 has discussed observations of eclipses and occultations previous to 

 1750. with the important practical result that by the removal of an 

 empirical term of long period from Hansen's lunar tables, and by an 

 empirical alteration of another term of long period, he is enabled to 

 represent satisfactorily the observations of the Moon from 1(525 to 

 the present time. 



The Rumford Medal has been awarded to Professor H. Hertz for 

 his work on Electro-magnetic Radiation. 



One of the most remarkable achievements of the late Professor 

 Clerk Maxwell was his electro-magnetic theory of light, in which it 

 was shown that a certain velocity, determinable numerically by purely 



