Royal Society. 05 



From eclipses of the Sun and Moon, the author passes in the 

 second part of his work to describe prospectively the most interes- 

 ting planetary phenomena, the periods at which they may be most 

 advantageously looked for, with the peculiar features they are likely 

 to present. Allusions are made to the Aurora, Zodiacal Light, 

 Meteors, &c. ; and we notice a remarkable suggestion embodied in a 

 communication to the ' Spectator ' by the Eev. E. L. Garbett, that 

 the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by a group of 

 the meteors following Tempel's telescopic comet of 1866. Mr. 

 Garbett gives six reasons for his suggestion as follows : — 



1. From the deduced period of node passage of the comet a 

 visit must have occurred in the autumn between b.c. 1898 and b.c. 

 1897, which is generally assumed as the date of the catastrophe. 



2. The earth's passage of node was on July 31. 



3. A vertical fall of meteors as rain was only possible at sunrise, 

 the hour of the destruction of the cities. 



4. The latitude of the vertical fall agrees with that of the cities. 



5. Sodium, the chief element in the deposits formed in the loca- 

 lity, is the chief element in these meteors as observed by Secchi. 



6. Magnesium, which also occurs in the locality, is the only other 

 ingredient in the meteors conspicuous to Secchi by means of the 

 spectroscope. 



" Suppose," says the writer, " any event not due to this comet to 

 be recorded. The chances against the account presenting these six 

 agreements with its elements and no disagreements, are three mil- 

 lions to one that the history of Sodom is true, and this the phy- 

 sical cause." 



The work closes with a list of 152 double stars and nebulse, ar- 

 ranged much in the same way as the portion on the Starry Heavens 

 of Webb's ' Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes,' the angles 

 of position of the double stars, as seen near the meridian, being in- 

 dicated by dots, an addition which we have no doubt will be duly 

 appreciated by those readers who are just commencing their obser- 

 vational career. 



XI. Proceedings of Learned Societies. 



ROYAL SOCIETY. 



[Continued from vol. xlvii. p. 457-] 



December 11, 1873. — Joseph Dalton Hooker, C.B., President, 

 in the Chair. 

 r PHE following communication was read : — 

 * " On the Action of Heat on Gravitating Masses." By Wil- 

 liam Crookes, F.B.S. &c. 



The experiments recorded in this paper have arisen from ob- 

 servations made when using the vacuum-balance, described by the 

 author in his paper "On the Atomic Weight of Thallium"*, for 



* Phil. Trans. 1873, vol. clxiii. p. 277. 

 Phil. Mag. S. 4. Vol. 48. No. 315. July 1874. F 



