During the greater part of the year our weather is mainly due to a constant procession of those Atlantic cyclones, great and small, and hence arises the changeableness of our winds and our weather. But in the spring we often have weather of a different type. Our winds are then often cold, sometimes dry, and frequently easterly or northerly in direction for several days together. Such weather is due to anti-cyclones—that is, areas of high pressure, from which the air flows downwards and spreads outwards in every direction. An anti-cyclone is the opposite of a cyclone in almost every respect. Its supply of dry air often comes from the ascending air in the centre of a cyclone, which has deposited its moisture. At the meteorological station on Ben Nevis it was sometimes noticed that when an anti-cyclone was stationed over the south of England, and a cyclone was crossing the north of Scotland, there was an upper air-current travelling from the latter to the former, and no doubt supplying the dry air of the anti-cyclone. This is a type of movement which is usually found over land rather than sea, and it has not the regular forward movement of the cyclone. The last point which we may notice about our weather is the amount of sunshine which we receive. At every well-equipped observatory, such as that of Deerness, there is an instrument which records the duration of sunshine, hour by hour and day by day, all the year round. In the matter of sunshine, Orkney is not so badly treated as we may sometimes think. The average number of hours of sunshine each year recorded at Deerness is 1,177, while Edinburgh enjoys only 1,166. London is a little better, with 1,260, while Hastings, on the more favoured south coast of England, has an average record of 1,780 hours. Our brightest month is May, with an average of 178 hours of sunshine, and our gloomiest month is naturally December, with only 20·6 hours. THE PLACE-NAMES OF ORKNEY. Orkney place-names form an attractive subject of study. There is always some reason why a certain place received its own particular name, though that reason may often be difficult to discover. The use of a name is, of course, to distinguish one place from other places of a similar class, and the most obvious way of doing so is to refer to some special feature or peculiarity of the place. In this way arise such names as the Red Head, the North Sea, the Muckle Water, and Green Holm. Houses and farms and islands are often named after the owner.