13 
or fire ball that it has ever been my fortune to observe. It 
passed just below E Bootes and travelled northwards in a 
descending direction between A Canes Yenatici and the 
large cluster in Coma, rather nearer the latter. It exactly 
resembled the globe of fire projected by a Homan candle ; 
the colour was of a brilliant yellow, and then after changing 
to a vivid green the meteor disappeared. The ball was 
pure and unattended by luminous track.” 
He gave the above particulars to show how observers 
were deceived as to the distance of meteors. The party 
who observed the one on the 15th of August near Bristol 
thought that it fell near Clevedon, while he (the President) 
seeing it at Douglas, 220 miles N.N.W. of that city, ima- 
gined it at no very great distance from him. He brought 
the matter before the Society for the purpose of enquiring 
whether the meteor had been observed by other parties, 
especially residents in Belfast or GlasgoA\r^ in order to ascer- 
tain if it had been seen westwards of those two places. 
Mr. A. M. Worthington described the changes which 
take place in the forms of drops of liquids falling vertically 
on a horizontal surface, and exhibited the apparatus used 
in his experiments, and also a series of smoked glass plates 
bearing the impressions produced by the falling of drops of 
liquids from different heights. 
Oil the Directions of the Face Joints of Oblique Arches,’'* 
by J. B. Millar, B.E., communicated by Professor 0. 
Keynolds, M.A. 
It was observed by Mr. Buck, as described in his well- 
known “Essay on Oblique Bridges,” that in the drawings of 
the faces of oblique arches when the face joints were drawn 
straight lines and produced, they all met in one point on 
the vertical line intersecting the axis of the arch. That 
point he called the “focus” and its distance from the axis of 
the arch the “ eccentricity^” He gives no reason for this 
convergence of the face joints; but taking it as a fact, he 
determined the focus for the joints at the springing, and so 
