430 Presidentship of William Spottiswoode 1880 



belonging to the Royal Dublin Society. In 1867 he was 

 put in charge of the Meteorological Office in London, where 

 he remained until 1900. As he issued and signed the daily 

 weather-charts which were reproduced in some of the news- 

 papers, he came to be familiarly known to many of his 

 friends as the " Clerk of the Weather." His little volumes 

 Weather-charts ana Storm-warnings and Elementary Meteoro- 

 logy were of service in spreading an intelligent comprehen- 

 sion of some of the more important features of the atmos- 

 phere. Elected into the Royal Society in 1870, he became 

 Treasurer of the Royal Society Club in 1885 and continued 

 to devote himself to its welfare for seventeen years thereafter. 



An important change in the hour of the ordinary meetings 

 of the Royal Society was introduced this year, to which 

 no allusion is made in the Minute-book or dinner-registers 

 of the Club, although it could not but directly affect 

 attendance at the Club. Up to this time the ordinary 

 meetings of the Society were always held in the evening, 

 the hour of assembly being successively altered from 6 to 

 8 and then to 8.30. The Club dinner took place, therefore, 

 before the Sociey's meeting, and members rose from the 

 table in time to be present at the meeting. But in 1880 the 

 Society changed the hour of its ordinary meetings to 4.30. 

 One function of the Club, that of contributing a company 

 of Fellows to the meeting of the Society, thus disappeared. 

 The Club, however, continued to meet in the evening at 

 the old hour, which was earlier than the usual hour for dinner, 

 but had it been made later the change would have incon- 

 venienced those members from a distance who had no club 

 or other resting-place in which to spend the very variable 

 interval after the close of the Society's meeting. 



Baron Elphinstone, one of the guests this year, the fifteenth 

 bearer of the title, and a representative Peer of Scotland, 

 dined as the guest of the President on I2th February. He 

 was frequently Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria and 

 was by her created Baron Elphinstone in the peerage of the 

 United Kingdom. Arnold Hague, another of the guests, 

 one of the best geologists on the staff of the Geological 



