XXXV111. ABSTRACT OF PROCEEDINGS. 



south to 33° south, no papers have been found drifting westerly 

 or easterly, except a few papers put afloat close to Australia, and 

 they as usual went ashore. In the next area, i.e., between 33° 

 south and 43° south, in the Indian Ocean, the current papers drift 

 easterly, or more accurately east-north-east ; twenty-one long 

 distance papers in this area give an average daily drift of 7 '6 miles. 

 In the next section, i.e., 43° south to 50° south, twenty current 

 papers shew a daily easterly drift of 9-4 miles. Tabulating the 

 dates at which current papers are found, it appears, that the 

 smallest number of current papers came ashore at the times of the 

 Equinoxes (March and September) and the greatest number 

 received in one month of each year is : — May 1897, ten papers ; 

 October 1898, twelve papers; August 1899, fourteen papers; 

 and February 1900, fourteen papers. 



2. "The Sun's Motion in Space."— Part I., History and Biblio- 

 graphy, by G-. H. Knibbs, f.r.a.s., Lecturer in Surveying, 

 University of Sydney. 

 Apart from its intrinsic interest, the determination of the 

 direction and quantity of the Sun's motion in space is of impor- 

 tance, as the condition of further progress in developing a satis-, 

 factory system of 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. The pre- 

 liminary paper (Part I) gives an account of the history and biblio- 

 graphy of the development of the idea of a motion of translation 

 of the sun through space, and also of the determinations of the 

 direction and amount of this motion, indicating briefly at the 

 same time the general principles underlying those determinations. 

 The conception of an indefinitely extended stellar universe, in 

 which the sun and its planetary system is but a single and perhaps 

 insignificant member, is one that the world owes to Giordano 

 Bruno, in 1584. The part played by Bruno, Schyrleus, Fontenelle, 

 Halley, Bradley, Wright, Kant, Mayer, Lambert, Michell, and 



