-at Bristol towventy-two years ago, and Sir William Crookes, its then President, Lord Kelvin, a past president, and Sir Norman Lockyer, a future president, were all alive, Lord Kelvin humorously commented on one of the drawbacks which always affect British Association discussions. "Sir Norman Lockyer comes here," he complained, "with all his theories carefully marshalled as to what may be taking place with the structure of elements in the Jaboratones of the sun or the stars; we Say we are not prepared to accept! them on the evidence; but we bring no constructive criticism forward to support a rival hypothesis—and 80 the discussion is shi other year." The Br tion meeting at Cardiff will find itself still discussing some of the problems which Sir Norman Lockyer used to put before them, and many of which remain to be-solved, but it will discuss them by the light of facts which have been patiently accumulated during the Twentieth Century, writes Mr. E. C. Crew, in the Ontain or Spectra.
Lockyer believed that the enormous temperatures and pressures of the sun and stars could transmute elements and could in a sense fashion them. The science of his day reluctantly accepted the possibility, but asked for positive evidence. The science of to-day has no reservations about the possibility of the formation of new elements or their transmutation in the sun or elsewhere, though it has yet to exhibit any more practical way of setting the transformations in motion than that of applying stellar temperatures to them. "But it is patiently probing the problems of the light which comes from sun or stars, or from earthly elements when heated to incandescence, in the hope of finding the key. Thus, for example, at Cardiff, Professor Fowler, whose studies of solar and stellar light by means of the spectroscope, have demonstrated that all the elements found on the earth are likewise found distributed among the suns of space; and Professor Nicholson, whose mathematical researches in the same region have established the existence of the celestial gases, coronium and nebulium—are to open jointly a discussion on the "Origin of Spectra."
Lica axp Gravity.
Allied to these considerations are the papers by Sir Ernest Rutherford on the "Building up of Atoms," in which ho will describe! how the processes imagined by Lockyer on the sun may be
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.