Richard Anthony Proctor, born at Chelsea, in London, in 1837, graduated at Cambridge in 1860. For the next twenty-eight years he earned his living by publishing many volumes on astronomy, popular and technical, fifty-seven having appeared at the time of his death, which took place at New York on September 12, 1888. Notwithstanding the vast amount of work bestowed on his books, his original investigations were permanent contributions to astronomical science. In 1870 he undertook to chart the directions and amounts of 1600 proper motions. While engaged on this work, it occurred to him that it would be “desirable and useful to search for subordinate laws of motion.” He found, from the laborious process of charting, that five of the seven stars of the Plough had a motion in common—that is to say, were moving in the same direction at the same rate. This phenomenon was termed by Proctor “star-drift.” He also recognised other instances of star-drift in other portions of the heavens. The subject was soon afterwards taken up by the French astronomer, Camille Flammarion. Born in 1842 at Montigny-le-Roi, in Haute Marne, Flammarion was appointed assistant to Le Verrier in 1858, but gave up his post in 1862. Employed successively at the Bureau des Longitudes, and as editor of scientific papers, he founded in 1882 his private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, where he has since continued his investigations. Following up Proctor’s discovery of star-drift, Flammarion drew charts of proper motions. He demonstrated the “common proper motion” of Regulus and an eighth-magnitude star, Lalande 19,749, from a comparison of his measures in 1877 with those of Christian Mayer a century previously; while he discovered many other instances. His reflections on these motions, as given in his ‘Popular Astronomy,’ are worthy of reproduction: “Such are the stupendous motions which carry every sun, every system, every world, all life, and all destiny in all directions of the infinite immensity, through the boundless, bottomless abyss; in a void for ever open, ever yawning, ever black, and ever unfathomable; during an eternity, without days, without years, without centuries, or measures. Such is the aspect, grand, splendid, and sublime, of the universe which flies through space before the dazzled and stupefied gaze of the terrestrial astronomer, born to-day to die to-morrow, on a globule lost in the infinite night.”