464 



blishments permanently existing in Europe and America are con- 

 fessedly inadequate to afford the requisite information. The stations 

 which have occurred to your Committee as most eligible, would be, 

 Vancouver Island, Newfoundland, the Falkland Isles, Bermuda, 

 Ceylon, Shanghai or some locality in China, and Mauritius ; but they 

 are fully aware that to demand from the national purse the institution 

 of observations at all these points, would be more than is warranted 

 by any pressing necessity, and ought therefore not to be insisted on. 

 Among them, the principal in point of interest (for reasons which 

 will be presently mentioned), are Vancouver Island, Newfoundland, 

 the Falkland Isles, and Pekin or some near adjacent Chinese station ; 

 and the Committee consider that much valuable information would 

 accrue from observations sufficiently prolonged at these, to which, 

 therefore, they would be understood to limit their recommendation. 

 In regard to the length of time over which they would desire to see 

 the observations extended, they consider five years (being about half 

 the solar period, and as being also sufficient to give a fair grasp of the 

 secular change of the magnetic elements) as a period both in con- 

 sonance with that which has been accorded on former occasions, and 

 in some sort designated by the nature of the case. 



The reasons which induce them to give a preference to these over 

 the rest of the stations enumerated are as follows : Between Toronto 

 and Point Barrow the difference of the epochal hours of the irregular 

 diurnal fluctuations is such as to amount to a complete opposition of 

 phases, a circumstance which goes far to point out the latter station 

 as being in the immediate neighbourhood of the origin of those ir- 

 regular disturbances. Should observations be established at the two 

 stations now proposed, there is every reason to hope, as will appear 

 from a document drawn up at the request of the Committee by 

 General Sabine, and with his permission appended to this Report, 

 that the observations at Toronto, which have been partially re-esta- 

 blished since 1855, would, with a view to cooperation for this especial 

 purpose, be wholly resumed on a fitting application to the Colonial 

 legislature. And, in addition to this, should an application, made to 

 the Norwegian Government for the establishment, during the same 

 period, of an observatory at the North Cape prove, successful (which 

 there is every reason to hope, such an application made on a former 

 occasion having been well received, and having ultimately failed owing 



