﻿Proceedings of the Society. 



61 



some of the audience manifested their interest by gathering round 

 the speaker and asking questions on various topics connected with 

 the weather. 



On February 20th, Mr. W. H. Knight lectured on ' 'Meteorites, 

 Shooting Stars, and Comets." "The Rosetta Stone of the Universe 

 is the spectroscope. With its aid we can read the message brought 

 to us by light, proclaiming that the universe is constructed upon 

 the same basis and of the same materials as our own earth." Shoot- 

 ing stars, meteors and meteorites were described at length. The 

 most wonderful of the meteors was that of i860, which passed over 

 the earth from Green Bay to Long Island. It was estimated to be 

 one thousand feet in diameter, and at its nearest approach to the 

 earth, to be only thirty-nine miles high. The lecturer stated that 

 in no case had he been able to verify accounts of loss of life by the 

 fall of meteorites, although such cases are often reported, and nar- 

 row escapes are common. There are four large collections of 

 meteorites in the United States. The largest, that of J. Lawrence 

 Smith, of Louisville, containing nearly five hundred specimens, 

 was sold, a few years before his death, to Harvard University. 

 Sometimes as many as three thousand stones fall in a single shower. 

 Meteorites invariably contain iron, often in combination with nickel. 

 Some are so pure as to be malleable when picked up, and horse- 

 shoes have been forged from pieces of them. No new metals 

 have been discovered in these bodies, and twenty-two of the 

 chemical elements have been detected. The largest meteorite 

 mentioned, is in Mexico, and weighs about five thousand pounds. 

 The nearest visit of a meteorite to our city, was in 1877, when one 

 fell at Cynthiana, Kentucky. 



On February 27th, Dr. Walter A. Dun lectured on "The Sci- 

 entific Value of Arctic Explorations." The lecturer, after a gen- 

 eral statement of the phenomena of heat and life, more especially 

 in relation to the Arctic regions, entered on the general subject of 

 the value of the results of the various expeditions sent to the North. 

 He did not find their value to either science or traffic to be at all 

 commensurate with the expenditure of life and treasure. Half the 

 amount expended in investigating the resources of southern coun- 

 tries, Mexico, for example, would yield a much larger return. The 



