Febeuaby 7, 1896.] 



SCmNGE. 



197- 



Min. • Max. 



Direction and' Velocity of the Wind at Vienna. 

 (Winter.) 



Min. 



Max. 



Direction and Velocity of the Wind at Vienna. 

 (Summer. ) 



Direction and Velocity of the Wind at Thorshavn. 

 (.Winter. ) 



Min. Max. 



Motions of Cirrus Clouds in Central Germany. 



into a rather well marked right-handed 

 whirl. It may be added that as far as the 

 movement of the cirrus is concerned, it 

 would suggest that inward baric gradients 

 prevail aloft over cyclones and that outward 

 gradients prevail over anticyclones, and 

 that this is on the whole more favorable to 

 the driven than to the convectional theory 

 of atmospheric whirls intemperate latitudes. 



W. M. Davis. 



Hakvaed Univeesity. 



Direction and Velocity of the Wind at Thorshavn. 

 (Summer. ) 



SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS. , 



ASTRONOMY. 



In our issue of January lOth we called at- 

 tention to Dr. See's announcement of a possible 

 perturbation of the motion of the visible com- 

 ponents of the binary star 70 OpMuchi by 

 an unseen companion. The Astronomical 

 Journal of January 9th contains another article 

 by Dr. See, in which he presents his views more 

 at length and with much painstaking care. 

 Yet after reading his elaborate paper, we can- 

 not see that he has established anything more 

 than a probability in favor of the existence of 

 the supposed body. His strongest argument is, 

 of course, the error of five degrees found by the 

 American observers in Prof. Schur's ephemeris.- 

 But at the time of making his calculations Dr. 

 See was unaware that nearly contemporaneous 

 European observations were at variance with 

 thie American ones. If we take the mean of all 

 the observations that have come to our knowl- 

 edge we get a result in very fair accord with 

 the ephemeris. Dr. See also bases a strong ar- 

 gument on the measures of distance, which 

 were not used by Prof. Schur for the well- 



