140 
BALL. 
known except to a few fur traders, was obtained and made 
public. To the Coast Survey work of 1871-74 we owe some 
forty charts, a large proportion of which are of harbors or 
passages,;never previously surveyed. In preparing a Coast 
Pilot of southeastern Alaska, w T hile that part of it useful to 
navigators was in the nature of things rapidly superseded, 
yet the work, being conscientious and thorough in the 
matter of names, practically settled the geographic nomen¬ 
clature of that region for all time. The myth of a branch of 
the Kuro Si wo or Japanese warm current running north 
through Bering sea and strait and producing open water in 
the Polar sea still lingers in some dark corners of geographic 
literature; but our researches, covering actual observation, 
the whole literature, and scores of old manuscript logbooks, 
conclusively show that there is no such current as that 
referred to, and that the currents which do exist have no 
connection whatever with the Japanese stream. Meteoro¬ 
logical observations were kept up in all those years, and 
afterward a complete synopsis of all the recorded meteoro¬ 
logical data for that region was prepared and issued by the 
Coast Survey with abundant illustrations. One of the re¬ 
sults of the magnetic observations made by our party, in the 
endeavor to correct the discrepancies between the variation 
of the compass needle as shown on the charts of Bering sea 
and strait and those observed by present navigators, was the 
discovery that the needle had reached its easternmost elon¬ 
gation and had for some time been receding in the amount 
of its variation. In gathering confirmatory data during 
1874 and 1880 more than forty stations in all parts of the 
territory were occupied. As in the case of the meteorology, 
the literature and all practicable sources were ransacked 
for magnetic records,* and these, with our own observations, 
were utilized in the excellent discussions of Alaskan mag¬ 
netism by Dr. C. A. Schott. 
In geology we were tutored before sailing in 1865 by Pro¬ 
fessor Agassiz and carried with us a written schedule of ob- 
* This work was almost entirely done by Mr. Marcus Baker. 
