1 76 SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
of Berlin in 1828, and the Royal Geographical Society 
in London in 1830. The last named claimed some sort 
of relationship it is true to the African Association of 
1788; but to all intents and purposes it was new in scope 
and in enthusiasm. The German gathering of Physicians 
and Men of Science which met periodically in different 
centres for the purpose of stimulating popular interest 
in the study of Nature had recently been founded and 
proved a great success. Sir David Brewster heard of 
it, visited one of its meetings, and returned to found in 
1831, with other active scientific men full of the growing 
enthusiasm for natural knowledge, the British Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of Science. From the outset 
this Association, though sneered at by not a few of the 
older hide-bound professors of the earlier period, set 
about the exhaustive discussion of pressing problems in 
pure and applied science. 
Gradually in every country of Europe and in the 
United States the need of a more exact and complete 
study of the laws of terrestrial magnetism had been 
recognised, and a period of rapid advance in magnetic 
observation set in, accompanied by improvements of the 
instruments employed in the field or in the observatory, 
and of the methods of calculation. The problem pre- 
sented by terrestrial magnetism is by no means entirely 
solved even now ; at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury it could hardly be propounded. In 1836 Humboldt 
declared that no other branch of science had advanced 
so far in a single generation. 
It is not necessary to tell anyone now-a-days that 
poetic phrases such as “ true as the needle to the pole ” 
do not represent the fact. It is generally known that the 
freely poised magnetic needle points in a different direc- 
