Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2017
During the last seven years we have become much more aware of the importance of velocity anisotropy in spheroidal components. There were never any sound arguments for assuming that the velocity ellipsoids in spheroidal components would be spherical, but the mathematical convenience of this assumption is such that velocity anisotropy was either absent from or unimportant in the models that seemed so promising at the last Besancon meeting in 1974. With the advent of accurate velocity information from absorption-line studies of early-type systems, it became apparent that the real world is a good deal more complex than it might have been, and the theoretical situation is now less satisfactory than it seemed in 1974. All I can do here is to report on our somewhat painful efforts to pick ourselves up from the floor to which the observers knocked us in 1975–7.