2S6 Proceedings of the British Association. 



work or inquiry was referred to him, it was generally completed in a 

 time which would seem hardly sufficient for other men to make the 

 preliminary investigation. Most of this was undoubtedly owing to 

 his admirable habits of system and order : to his always doing one 

 thing at one time : to his clear and precise estimate of the extent of 

 his own powers. Though he always wrote clearly and well, he never 

 wrote ambitiously : and though he almost always accomplished what 

 he undertook, he never affected to execute or to appear to execute, 

 what was beyond his powers. This was the true secret of his great 

 success, and of his wonderful fertility ; and it would be difficult to 

 refer to a more instructive example of what may be effected by prac- 

 tical good sense, systematic order, and steady perseverance. 



It was the same meeting at Newcastle which gave rise to the 

 design for the greatest combined scientific operation in which the 

 Association has ever been engaged for the extension of our knowledge 

 of the laws of magnetism and meteorology. 



It was the publication of Colonel Sabine's Report on the variations 

 of the magnetic intensity at different points of the earth's surface, and 

 the map which accompanied it, which appeared in our volume for 1837, 

 which first enabled the celebrated Gauss to assign provisionally the 

 co- efficients of his series for expressing the magnetic elements ; the 

 proper data of theory are the values of the magnetic elements, at 

 given points uniformly and systematically distributed over the surface 

 of the earth : and it was for the purpose of supplying the ac- 

 knowledged deficiency of these data, and of determining the laws 

 which regulated the movements of this most subtle and mysterious 

 element, the Association was induced to appoint a committee to 

 apply, in conjunction with the Royal Society, to her Majesty's 

 Government, to make a magnetical survey of the highest accessible 

 altitudes of the Antarctic seas, and to institute fixed magnetical and 

 meteorological observatories at St. Helena, the Cape, Hobarton, and 

 Toronto, in conjunction with a normal establishment at Greenwich, 

 and in connexion with a great number of others on the continent of 

 Europe ; where systematic and simultaneous observations could be 

 made which would embrace not only the phenomena of magnetism, 

 but those of meteorology also : it is not necessary to add that the 

 application was promptly acceded to. The views and labours of the 



