Ata recent meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society at Burlington House Dr. Jeans gave a summary tot two papers dealing with the motion of the stars as a whole. In paper read before the British sociation at Edinburgh Professor Khpteyn, of Groningen, extended \his ellipsoidal theory of the universe, which was originally based: en the assumption that the solar system was in the centre of the galaxy, and by comparing his curves with actual observations came to the conclusion that the sun's dis-[tance from the centre is at least 660 parsecs (a parsec being nearly three light years). He considered that it could not be-more than 700 parsees. So he adopted 650 as a {probable value. Dr. Jeans. finding that at least one of Kapteyn's assumptions was not only. unnecessary, but inaccurate and led to contradietory results, repeated the investigation without making the assumption and found an uncounted distance of 1,090 parsees, but by applying a correction which was unfexpectediy large, reduced this 10 [about 700 parsecs. In the course of further analysis he came to the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.