We begin another session in the fifth year of this unparalleled war with the certainty that freedom, justice, and the rights of small nationalities, for which the Allies have so bravely fought, will ultimately triumph. The administration of the affairs of the Society under conditions so abnormal has caused considerable anxiety. The great increase in the cost of paper and printing compelled the Council last session to limit the expenditure on the Transactions and Proceedings. By adhering rigidly to certain resolutions which they laid down, they have enabled the Treasurer to present a more favourable financial report than was expected.

Henry George Bonavia-Hunt, Mus.D., was born in Malta under somewhat romantic circumstances. His father, who as private secretary to the Bishop of Jerusalem had joined the Bishop in Palestine, was plunged into the deepest grief by the death of his wife and infant son. He was returning to England in a very broken condition, but became so ill that it was thought expedient to land him at Malta. Here he was kindly received and cared for by a certain Dr Bonavia, whose young daughter nursed the stricken Englishman back to convalescence through a long and tedious illness. The inevitable followed. The lonely young widower married his devoted nurse, and later returned to England with their first child—the subject of this memoir.

But a few years ago the diverse phenomena of optical activity, such as the changes of rotation which occur with alteration of temperature, of colour of light, of solvent, or of concentration in a solvent, appeared, in spite of the great accumulation of relative data, to be practically independent of each other, and gave very little hope of satisfactory generalisation. Quite recently, however, the possibility of bringing into one scheme all these different branches of the subject has become more than a mere aspiration, and the progress which has been made by several investigators reveals clearly the existence of a deep-seated and farreaching regularity underlying the remarkable sensitiveness to external conditions of the phenomena in question.

(1) The main specialty in the construction of the arrays in question is that the elements of each row are the coefficients of the powers of x in the expansion of a product of the form

that is to say, the rows all belong to the type

The variables from which the elements of any row are formed are n − 1 consecutive members of a series of n(n − 1) members, the member considered to be consecutive to the last being the first member; for example, when n is 3 and the 3(3 − 1) independent variables are

a, b, c, d, e, f,

the rows of the arrays are

Further, these rows in order are taken to form all the first rows of the arrays, then all the second rows, and so on.

1. Among the well-known theorems for the breaking up of a circulant into factors are the following:—

Theorem I.*—The circulant

where θ is one of the nth roots of unity.

1. It is pointed out that for very small adsorptions the adsorption law appears to be

for both gases and solutions.

2. The general form of the adsorption curve for solutions is deduced from the above conclusion and found to agree with the results of different observers.

The author wishes to thank Professor James Walker, F.R.S., for his assistance in the presentation of this paper.

I wish to preface this statement of my views with an acknowledgment of my indebtedness to the works of Major Gold, Mr W. H. Dines, Sir Napier Shaw, Captain Cave, and Mr Lempfert, and more especially to the suggestions of Captain G. W. Jones, R.A.F. Captain Jones was the first person to draw my attention to the fact that changes in the upper wind frequently precede changes in the lower wind. In addition, he has often expressed to me his conviction that the entire theory of the winds requires to be rewritten; that convection and surface friction are of much less importance than is generally supposed, and that we have no reason to regard the variations of the upper winds as less, either in magnitude or abruptness, than those of the lower winds.

M. ribis, Linn, (red-currant aphis), on Ribes rubrum is dimorphic in respect of certain features of the antenna and of abdominal and wing dimensions.

The nature of the food, whether healthy or blistered by the attack of the fundatrix, seems to be the determining factor of this dimorphism.

The form from healthy leaves is probably identical with M. whitei, Theobald, and M. dispar, Patch.

M. ribis is migratory, and in summer colonises certain Labiatæ and other weeds; but this migration is not obligatory, and the entire life-cycle may be passed on currant.

On its summer host plant this species has been previously described as Phorodon galeopsidis, Kaltenbach.

There is a decline in fertility in the later part of the summer among the forms remaining on currant.

This is caused by a lower birth-rate, and not by the shortening of the life of the parent.

This decline, together with the attacks of predaceous and parasitic enemies, accounts for the frequent disappearance of the species from currant in August and September.

Both sexual forms may be produced, and eggs may be laid, on either host plant. Males transferred from Labiatæ to Ribes can fertilise the females on the latter plant.

1. The following note may be of some interest as helping in the elucidation of the rather complex analytical questions involved in the derivation of the modified Lagrangian function for a dynamical system. The results derived also have some bearing on the various questions involved in the transformation theory based on Hamilton's equations of motion. The discussion is given for the simplest type of system, but it can be easily generalised to the less restricted cases covered by the results.

In this paper I am mainly concerned with the surface soil temperature, but as we are accustomed by long usage to think of the grass minimum temperature as determining the occurrence or non-occurrence of frost, a few words of explanation on this point is perhaps necessary at the outset.

The grass minimum on nights of rapid radiation certainly does fall considerably below the surface soil minimum, but this is due to the very fact that it is the grass minimum, i.e. the air temperature just on the grass.

It is well known that when the stinging hairs of the common nettle (Urtica dioica or U. urens) are caused to discharge their contents upon blue litmus paper, intensely red spots are produced. On the subsequent exposure to the air of the paper thus spotted, the red colour gradually diminishes in intensity, and in a day or two is scarcely distinguishable, although it does not entirely disappear even after several weeks' exposure. This behaviour indicates that the reddening is due, in the main at least, to a volatile acid, and the range of acids probably present is thereby very strictly limited.

During the last twenty years colloidal solutions of various metals have been largely used in therapeutics. Few investigations, however, have been made on their mode of action, and most of these have been made on mammals. As a contribution to the subject some experiments made under simpler conditions seem worthy of record. The reaction employed was the effect of an electrolyte-free silver sol on bacteria. Somewhat similar experiments have been made by Henri and coadjutors. These, which are referred to later, were unknown to me at the time of the investigation.

When a moderately strong solution of sodium nitrite is added to blood a change of colour almost immediately occurs, mainly owing to the formation of methæmoglobin. The actual products of the reaction are not definitely known, and are not of importance to the present paper. The rapidity of the reaction is affected by the nature and concentration of the blood solution on the one hand, and by the concentration of the sodium nitrite solution on the other. Probably other factors, such as temperature, which has not been investigated, are of importance. The experiments referred to in this paper were made at room temperatures.

This paper is a continuation of two papers on Seismic Radiations published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. xxviii, pp. 217–230 (1907–8) and vol. xxx, pp. 23–37 (1909). The object of the present communication is to place on record a new determination of the laws of propagation of seismic waves based upon a method of calculation in which no assumptions are made as to the functional relation between velocity of propagation and distance from the earth's centre. References to the work of others will be given incidentally as occasion arises.

In this paper it is proposed to analyse in a tentative way the Electron-Transference Hypothesis of Chemical Combination which has been put forward by Lord Kelvin in his paper entitled “Aepinus Atomised” (Phil. Mag., 1902), and by Sir J. J. Thomson (Phil. Mag., 1904).

This hypothesis postulates that on the combination of two or more atoms to form a chemical compound electrons are transferred from atoms playing an electro-positive part to those playing an electro-negative part in the molecule, the number of electrons thus transferred being taken as a measure of the valencies of the respective atoms in the molecule. Such an hypothesis would not lead to conceptions at variance with the facts of electrolytic dissociation.

The present paper is a continuation of one published thirteen years ago describing a new form of harmonic synthetiser. The object is to show that by a slight alteration the simple form of mechanism proposed by Lord Kelvin in 1881, but afterwards rejected by him on acount of “obliquity error,” can be made quite satisfactory.