mathematical calculation, founded on the laws of motion, has proved that rings like those of Saturn, if solid or liquid, would be broken up in a very short time by the enormous forces which are exerted upon them. The solid would either be broken up into pieces, or else it would as a whole go against Saturn on one side or another. The liquid would be broken up by enormous forced waves travelling round it, like the waves produced by a canal boat, which would go on increasing and increasing until they ruptured it. Clerk-Maxwell has shown, in his Adams' Prize Essay, that no hypothesis whatever will account for the form and permanence of these rings, except the supposition that they consist of clouds of stones, or fragments of matter of some kind or another, flying round, each almost like an independent member of a family of satellites, but still, of course, acting upon one another by their mutual gravitation. That mutual gravitation is, no doubt, sufficient to produce among them impacts with considerable relative velocity; so that it is possible that we may some day find bright lines in the spectrum of the light from the rings. Thus these rings of Saturn, like everything cosmical, must be gradually decaying, because in the course of their motion round the planet there must be continual impacts amongst the separate portions of the mass; and of two which impinge, one may be accelerated, but it will be accelerated at the expense of the other. The other falls out of the race, as it were, and is gradually drawn in towards the planet. The consequence is that, possibly not so much on account of the improvement of telescopes of late years, but perhaps simply in consequence of this gradual closing in of the whole system, a new ring of Saturn has been observed inside the two old ones,-what is called from its appearance the crape ring, which was narrow when first observed, but is gradually becoming broader. That is formed of the laggards, as it were, which have been thrown out of the race, and which are gradually falling in towards the planet's surface. The second instance I refer to is the zodiacal light, which obviously cannot possibly be part of the gaseous atmosphere of the sun, nor can it be any solid or liquid body. It must be of the nature of detached portions of solid or liquid, floating as separate satellites, revolving about the sun, though by no means necessarily in orbits nearly circular. The spectrum of the zodiacal light has been examined. It is an extremely difficult thing to examine it; however, the task has been at least partially accomplished. The light is far too faint to enable even the most skilled observer, with the most perfect of our present instruments, to say whether there are dark lines across its spectrum or not. The spectrum has been found to be at least practically continuous; that is to say, it has been found to be probably that of reflected sunlight simply. Thus the zodiacal light reveals to us the existence of enormous amounts of small cosmical masses which have been somehow or other detached from comets or swarms of meteorites, and forced, whether by planetary attraction or by resistance, to revolve in orbits of moderate size about the sun. As they have been seized at different times and from different sources of supply, they probably move in all sorts of orbits-with all sorts of eccentricities and inclinations somewhere about half of them probably going round in the opposite direction to that in which the planets move. Meteorites or aërolites, which every now and then reach the earth, may often be portions of this source of the zodiacal light. These scattered fragments, gradually resisted, or impinging upon one another, fall in age after age towards the sun's surface. They must thus form a supply, although an extremely small and inadequate supply, of potential energy, which has the effect of, to a certain extent, maintaining the sun's heat. I must now take leave of this part of the subject, and I do so by recurring to what I said at the commencement of it. I began by saying that, after studying the laws of heat and thermo-dynamics, we should consider some very important cases of the transference of heat or energy from one body to another. We have already treated of the radiation of heat and the absorption of heat. Now we come to another case of the transference of energy: the case in which energy is transferred continuously from one part of a body to another part of the same body; and here we must deal, first of all, with what is called conduction of heat. This subject was very fully worked out as a mathematical problem long before the period to which these lectures are professedly confined, but great additional information has been obtained about it within that period, and therefore I propose in my next lecture to give a brief sketch of the early development of it; and then to go more fully into the recent extensions and additions which it has obtained. Along with the conduction of heat I shall, virtually at least, treat of other things which, although having apparently no connection whatever with conduction of heat, really have precisely the same laws. These are the conduction of electricity, as, for instance, in a submarine cable, and the diffusion of a salt or an acid in a solution in water. Perfectly different as these phenomena appear to be, they are all, when treated mathematically, dependent upon the same differential equation (merely, of course, because their elementary laws, which are summed up with all their possible consequences in that equation, are of precisely similar form); and therefore by the change of a word or two, any statement made with regard to the one can be transformed into an equally true statement with regard to either of the others. LECTURE XI. CONDUCTION OF HEAT. Fourier's Mathematical Theory. His Definition of Conducting Power. Analogy between Thermal and Electric Conductivities. Forbes's method and results. Ångström's method. Penetration of Surface temperature into the earth's crust. Analogy between conduction of heat and conduction of electricity. Diffusion also analogous to these. Diffusion of matter, of kinetic energy, and of momentum. As I promised in my last lecture, I now proceed to a consideration of the subject of the conduction of heat. A great deal was known about the conduction of heat before the period to which my lectures specially refer, but during that period a very great deal of quite unexpected information has been obtained on the subject. Perhaps it will conduce to the intelligibility of what I have to say about the new matter, if I briefly run over what was known about the time when Principal Forbes commenced his experimental inquiries into the question before us. It was Fourier who first put the laws of conduction of heat into a perfectly definite mathematical form, and who invented, for the purpose of investigating detailed problems on the subject, a mathematical method of exquisite power. Fourier defined conductivity—the conducting power of a substance-in a manner which has not been improved since. He defines it, in fact, in this |