148 H. G. SMITH. 



acid, no other acid being present, at any rate in those oils which 

 have been exhaustively investigated. 



The remainder of the acid distillate was neutralised with soda 

 and evaporated to crystallising point; very fine crystals of sodium 

 acetate were thus obtained. 



I wish to express my thanks to my colleague, Mr. R. T. Baker 

 f.l.s., for botanical assistance in preparing this paper. 



THE SUN'S MOTION IN SPACE. 



Part I. History and Bibliography. 



By G. H. Knibbs, f.r.a s., 



Lecturer in Surveying, University of Sydney. 



[Read before the Royal Society of N. S. Wales, November 7, 1900.~\ 



Apart from its intrinsic interest, the determination of the direc- 

 tion and quantity of the sun's motion in space is important, as 

 being the condition of further progress in developing a satisfactory 

 system for defining the places of stars. The establishment of such 

 fixed planes of reference as will be unaffected by the relative or 

 absolute motions of the sun and stars, even for great periods of 

 time, is clearly a desideratum, if not essential, in any thorough 

 scheme of analysis of such movements. It is proposed in this 

 paper to give an account of the history and bibliography of the 

 development of this idea, of a motion of translation of the sun 

 through space, and also of the determinations of its direction and 

 amount, indicating briefly at the same time the general principles 

 underlying the determinations. The different references are 

 numbered for the sake of convenience. This is a step preliminary 

 to a further consideration of the whole question, and since no such 

 bibliography has yet been published, nor has any complete review of 



