Professor Elias Loorrds, 431 



pur on the Committee on Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. 

 These arc the only signs of scientific taste or activity which 1 

 have detected earlier than the autumn of L834, after he had 

 been a year and a term in the tutorship. From this time on to 

 the end of his life, he gave his time and energies to several 

 subjects that are enough distinct one from the other to make 

 it convenient to disregard a strictly chronological account of his 

 labors, and consider his work in each subject by itself. 



A subject of which lie early undertook the investigation was 

 Terrestrial Magnetism. We often use the rhetorical phrase 

 "True as the needle to the pole,-' but, looked at carefully, the 

 magnetic needle is anything but constant in direction ; like the 

 weather vane on the steeple, it is ever in motion, swinging 

 hack and forth, in motions minute and slow it is true, but still 

 always swinging. It has fitfully irregular motions ; — it has 

 motions with a daily period ; — motions with an annual period ; 

 and motions whose oscillations require centuries for completion. 



The daily motions of the magnetic needle were those which 

 Tutor Loomis first studied. At the beginning of the second 

 year of his tutorship he set up by the north window of his 

 room in North College a heavy wooden block, and on it the 

 variation compass that belongs to the College. Here for over 

 thirteen months, he observed the position of the needle at 

 hourly intervals in the day time, his observations usually being 

 for seventeen successive hours of each day. 



The results of these observations, together with a special 

 discussion of the extraordinary cases of disturbance, were j>ub- 

 lished in the American Journal of Science in 1836. No 

 similar observations of the kind made in this country had at 

 that time been published. So far as I am aware, none made 

 before 1834 have since been published, except ten days obser- 

 vations made by Professor Bache in 1832. In fact, I know 

 of only one or two like series of hourly observations made in 

 Europe earlier than these by Tutor Loomis. He also at this 

 time formed the purpose of collecting all the observations of 

 magnetic declination that had been hitherto made in the 

 I nited States, and of constructing from them a magnetic chart 

 of the country. He appealed successfully to the Connecticut 



