ADDRESS 



BY 



THE REV. W. VERNON HARCOURT. 



A FEW weeks since I bade farewell to one whose friendship I owe to 

 this Association, setting forth on an enterprize full of labour and 

 hazard, but full also of such visions of glory, and so brilliant a pro- 

 spect of scientific conquests, that for a mind combining the high aims 

 of the philosopher with the intrepidity of the sailor, no danger, no 

 difficulty, no inconvenience seemed to exist, even in those regions where 

 Stern famine guards the solitary coast. 

 And winter barricades the realms of frost. 



We sat down. Gentlemen, before his chart of the Southern Seas, and 

 the unapproached pole of the earth : he showed me his intended track ; 

 he pointed out the happy coincidence of the recent discovery (one 

 of the debts which science owes to commerce) of two small islands in 

 those seas ; he put his finger upon the spot which theory assigns for 

 the magnetic pole of verticity, corresponding to that which he had 

 himself discovered in the opposite hemisphere, and so situated, inter- 

 mediately between the two newly-discovered insular stations, that 

 should he not reach the pole itself, they would enable him to verify or 

 correct the theory ; and again, on the spot where his course would cross 

 the point of maximum intensity which the same theory involves. We 

 next reviewed the places at which he is commissioned to plant, on his 

 way, three magnetical and meteorological observatories, — St. Helena, 

 the Cape, and Van Diemen's Land, and those at which he himself 

 especially wished to observe, — at Kerguelen's Land, New Zealand, and 

 other stations on the land and ice ; and we talked of all these as part 

 only of a system of observations simultaneous or combined, stretching 

 from one side of the earth to the other, undertaken or promised, through 

 the whole extent of the British empire, from Montreal to Madras, and 

 blending in co-operation with chains of observatories established, or on 

 the point of being established, by other nations in the four quarters of 

 the world. 



I confess, Gentlemen, I felt, as one of the white and bright moments 



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