Otago institute. First Meeting. 11th May, 1875. J. S. Webb, President, in the chair. New Members.—W. D. Montague, J. S. Connell. The President delivered the following

Address. An opening address from your Chairman at the first meeting of the session does not form part of our recognized programme. Neither do I think that any general remarks that I could address to you would be of that interest which should characterise any paper read here, unless, in imitation of the customs of more important societies, it should contain a resumé of all that has been done during the past year in some department of science, a task quite beyond my abilities. I must ask you, therefore, to allow me to-night to offer a few remarks on a special subject, remarks too general in their character to form what we usually understand by a scientific paper, but which will, I hope, be found of interest. They form the forerunner of a paper in which the same subject will be treated in a more technical manner, which I shall have the honour to submit to the Institute as soon as other engagements admit of its completion—“On recent attempts to estimate the Temperature of the Sun.”

All recent discoveries in physics have tended to establish what is now accepted as a fundamental theorem of scientific cosmogony, viz., that the sun and all orbs of which we know anything at all, including our earth itself, are heated bodies, which must in the end succumb to the effects of their constant radiation of heat into the cold wastes of space. Although we have no data by which to determine whether the sun itself has reached that stage of aggregation at which its temperature must be constantly falling, the idea that it has both reached and passed that point in its history seems to be generally prevalent in the scientific world. It has been established that, so far as we are able to probe it, the temperature of the interior of the earth is very considerable. Prevalent theories as to the past of our globe lead to the conclusion that this internal temperature is sufficient to maintain the central portions of the sphere in a molten condition; and, though this has been energetically disputed, on the ground of its alleged disaccordance with the phenomena of nutation and precision, it remains certain that the internal heat is adequate to maintain the surface at a temperature considerably above that of external space, even in the absence of the sun. But whatever this temperature might be, it is certain