president's address. Ixix. 



magnitude is shewn. This is rather less than that obtained 

 by other methods. The speeds of stars through space vary 

 from about 12 to 34 kilometres per second,so far as determined, 

 our sun having a velocity of 19 J kilometres. Their tempera- 

 tures vary from 400,000° Centigrade for 7 Pegasi to 2,150° 

 for a Tauri, the sun bemg 4,950°. But different observers 

 have varied in their results, especially in the hotter stars. 

 Stars like Sirius in their spectra are about 50 times as bright 

 as the sun, orange stars about one-sixth as bright, red stars 

 only one-fiftieth. But these data can only be obtained for 

 stars the distances of which can be measured. There would 

 appear to be in the Milky Way, and possibly elsewhere, masses 

 of gas of such a dark nature as to hide the stars behind it, and 

 in this way the existence of blank spaces is explained. Many 

 very fine photographs of Nebulse, shewmg beautiful forms, 

 have been taken with the large reflector at the Lick Observa- 

 tory, and are contained in Bulletin 219 of their publications. 



Meteorology, 



Though the law of average can usually be relied upon to 

 give much the same results when any fairly long series of 

 years are taken into consideration, it is not often that a hot, 

 dry summer like that of 1911 is followed immediately by what 

 one may call an absence of summer like that of 1912, when 

 cold and rain were almost perpetual, and though the tempera- 

 ture of July is shewn by the thermometer to have been 

 slightly above the average, which will certainly be a surprise 

 to those who experienced it, it is well made up on the other 

 side by the cold months of June, August, and September. 

 August was the coolest August ever recorded and the wettest 

 month of the year, and wetter than any August in the past 57 

 years, except in 1878. I am speaking so far of the Greenwich 

 records, but they are applicable to most other places. The 

 yearly rainfall was greatly in excess of the average in Dorset 

 and elsewhere, except in the West of Scotland. To counter- 



