18 Scientific Progress of the Past Year. [January, 
The spedtroscopic determination of the motions of stars 
in the line of sight by the displacement of lines in their 
spedtra, has been recently extended at Greenwich to stars of 
the third and fourth magnitude, raising the number of stars 
available for the application of this method to 200 or 300. 
Up to the present time, the motions of 63 stars have been 
thus determined at Greenwich. Mr. Seabroke, at Rugby, 
has also applied the method to 28 stars, and his results, 
though presenting some discordances, inter se, generally 
support those obtained by Mr. Huggins and by the Green- 
wich observers.* * * § . 
A new determination of the Figure of the Earth, m which 
the results of recent measurements of the Indian arc of 24° 
are included, has been made by Colonel Clarke. t 
A connexion between the Sun’s Outer Corona and Meteor 
Streams has been suggested by several observers, Professor 
Cleveland Abbe, Mr. F. C. Penrose, and others , % of the 
Solar Eclipse of 1878. 
From a discussion of the distribution of aphelia and inclin- 
ations of cometary orbits, Professor H. A. Newton has come 
to the conclusion that comets have come to us from the 
stellar spaces (in accordance with Laplace’s hypothesis) and 
that (with the possible exception of the comets of short 
period) they have not originated within the solar system as 
Kant supposed. § 
Mr. Gill has deduced from his extensive series of Helio- 
meter Observations of Mars at Ascension, the value 
8 // 78+o /, *oi5 for the Sun’s mean Equat. Hor. Parallax.!! 
This agrees nearly with the first published result of the 
British Transit of Venus Expeditions, and also with the 
result of Cornu’s determination of the velocity of light com- 
bined with Struve’s constant of aberration. 
The publication of Lohrmann and Schmidt’s Maps of the 
Moon forms an important contribution to Selenography. 
M. Flammarion has published a valuable Catalogue of 
Binary Stars, giving all available observations (to the 
number of 14,000) of these objects, with the elements of 
their orbits, so as to present a complete summary of their 
history. 
Among the more recent Institutions for the promotion 
of Science, mention should be made of the Observatories 
* “ Monthly Notices,” 1879, June. 1879, October 10. 
f “ Phil. Mag.,” 1878, August. 
+ “ Monthly Notices.” 1878, November. 
§ “ Amer. Jourti.,” 1878, September. 
|! “ Monthly Notices,' *879, June. 
