430 REPORT—1840. 
the 29th to the 30th, as well as for some hours previous, 
while it might be presumed to be in progress, though ef- 
faced by daylight, all the three magnetical instruments were 
thrown into a state of continual and very extraordinary dis- 
turbance. In fact, at 64 25™ in the morning of the 29th, 
the disturbance in the magnetic declination during a single 
minute of time carried the needle over 10! of arc; and during 
the most brilliant part of the evening’s display (from 35 25™ 
Gott. M. T. to 45 35™,) the disturbances were such as to throw 
the scales of both the vertical- and horizontal-force magnetome- 
ters out of the field of view, and to produce a total change of 
declination amounting to 1° 59’. It should also be remarked, 
that the greatest and most sudden disturbances were coinci- 
dent with great bursts of the auroral streamers. The corre- 
spondence, or want of correspondence, of these deviations with 
the perturbations of the magnetic elements observed in Europe, 
and elsewhere, on the same day, cannot fail to prove of great 
interest. Should it fortunately have happened that Captain 
Ross has been able to observe. that term at Kerguelen’s Land, 
which is not very far from the antipodes of Toronto, an indi- 
cation will be afforded whether or not the electric streams pro- 
ducing the Aurora are to be regarded as diverging from one 
magnetic pole or region, and converging to another*. 
Your Committee cannot conclude this report without con- 
egratulating the Association, and the scientific world in general, 
on the extensive interest inspired, and the vast range of obser- 
vation consequently embraced by these operations, which, so far 
as any accounts have hitherto reached them, appear to be so 
far going on prosperously in all its parts, and to promise re- 
sults fully answerable to every expectation of its promoters. 
Neither would they feel justified in their own eyes, were they 
to omit expressing their deep and grateful sense of the inde- 
fatigable personal exertions of Major Sabine throughout the 
whole of its progress, both in carrying on a most voluminous 
correspondence, in ordering, arranging and dispatching in- 
* In reference to the Aurora which had been seen at Toronto in Upper 
Canada on the 29th of May, and to the magnetic perturbations by which its 
appearance had been accompanied, the Astronomer-Royat stated, that the 
term-day of the 29th and 30th of May had also been kept at the Royal Ob- 
servatory at Greenwich; that an Aurora was seen there also on the 29th, and 
that the disturbances of the declination magnetometer exceeded in amount any 
which had been observed there on previous occasions. Not having brought 
the observations with him, Mr. Airy could not state whether their comparison 
with the curves of the Toronto Observatory, which Major Sabine had laid be- 
fore the Section, would manifest an accordance between the disturbances at the 
igs stations, a point of the highest interest as to the nature and extent of 
these. 
