I have been requested by our Secretary to announce formally from the Council, that this is the last meeting for the Winter Session.

You will have seen from the billet, that our President, Sir William Thomson, was to have been in the chair to-night, and to have closed the session with some remarks suitable to the occasion.

The Keith Prize for the Biennial Period (1871–73) having been awarded by the Council to Professor Tait for his Paper, entitled “First Approximation to a Thermo-Electric Diagram,” which has been published in the Transactions, the Medal was delivered to him by the President at the commencement of the meeting.

The volume marked “Logarithms 0” now placed on the Society's table contains, to 28 places, the Logarithms of all numbers up to Ten Thousand. In preparing it, care was taken that each prime should be placed in connection with two distinct sets of other prime numbers, in order that all likelihood of mistake should be avoided. This amounts to the computation of each logarithm by two independent processes. Opposite each prime, reference is made to the page of the record of calculations; and the accompanying volumes marked “Construction, I., II.” contain minutes of each articulate step, so that the genesis of any logarithm may readily be traced and examined.

After an historical introduction, in the course of which the author gave an abstract of the important observations of Pflüger and Waldeyer, he proceeded to state his own observations on the development of the ova and structure of the ovary in calves, kittens, and the human female. The following general conclusions have been arrived at by the author in the course of his investigations :—

The corpuscles of the germ epithelium are derived by direct proliferation from those columnar corpuscles which invest the median side or surface of the Wolffian body, and which are continuous with the layer of columnar corpuscles that lines the pleuro-peritoneal cavity of the embryo in the early stages of development. The stroma of the ovary in the early stages of development is produced by a direct growth out from the interstitial tissue of the Wolffian body immediately beneath the germ epithelium on the median side of the Wolffian body.

The theorem in question, in its simplest form, is

Abel's proof of it involves the properties of the gamma-function, and requires that ƒ′(ξ) should'be capable of development in powers of ξ. (Œuvres, I. 27.)

Some results given in Vol. I. of Thomson and Tait's Natural Philosophy may be much more simply obtained by calculating the potential of a wire rather than its attraction. That potential is easily found as

where c is the length of the wire, ρ its line density, r1 and r2 the distances of its ends from the point at which the potential is to be found.

The principle that, while additional constraints cannot disturb equilibrium, unnecessary constraints may be removed without disturbing equilibrium, is of very great use in the statics of fluids and of elastic and flexible bodies. But it seems not to have been made use of to the extent its importance deserves.

My attention was recalled to it when attempting to compare the shares taken by gravity and cohesion in resisting the tendency of the so-called centrifugal force to split a planet. The problem which first proposed itself was to determine the gravitation attraction of one-half of a uniform sphere upon the other.

We have lost another eminent member of our Society in Mr Cosmo Innes, of whom I shall venture to give a short account. I do not think it necessary to make it long, and this for various reasons. Mr Innes's labours were more nearly akin to the studies of another Society which meets under the same roof with ourselves, and within that body, I believe, tributes have been paid to his memory far more intelligent and more worthy of his reputation than any I could venture to offer. The general features of his career, also, are so well and widely known, and have been recalled to our recollection of late in such various ways, that any detailed narrative would be superfluous.

JACQUES-ADOLPHE-LAMBERT QUETELET.—On 17th February 1874 Quetelet died at Brussels, in the seventy-eighth year of his age, having been born at Ghent on 22d February 1796. At the age of 18 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics in the College at Ghent; and in July 1819, the degree of Doctor of Science was conferred on him by the University of the same town, which had just been founded by King William. His dissertation on the occasion was so well received that he was shortly thereafter appointed to the Chair of Mathematics in the Royal Athenæum of Brussels. In February following he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres.