328 
LITTLEHALES. 
tion existed more than four centuries ago, it was reserved 
to Columbus, during his voyage of discovery to the New 
World, to find that the amount by which the needle de¬ 
clines from the true meridian was not everywhere the same, 
but that in one part of the Atlantic Ocean the compass 
pointed to the west of north, and in another part to the east 
of north; and it was no longer ago than the year 1634 when 
Gellibrand, a professor of mathematics at Gresham College, 
in England, found that the declination at any certain place 
does not remain the same, but suffers a perpetual fluctuation 
with the course of time. The world waited for a realization 
that the magnetic needle, when freely suspended, inclines 
or dips below the horizon, until Norman, a seaman and 
practical instrument-maker, made his experiments in the 
year 1576, and, besides discovering the magnetic inclina¬ 
tion, published the surmise that the magnetic directing- 
force has its seat within the earth, and not in the heavens 
as had previously been supposed. 
Thus, it was not until the age of medievalism was ap¬ 
proaching its end that any of the tenets which lie at the 
foundation of terrestrial magnetism as a system of organ¬ 
ized knowledge were laid down; and not until the new 
intellectual life, heralded by the achievements of Galileo, 
Kepler, Gilbert, the Cassinis, Iluyghens, Hooke, and New¬ 
ton, had overspread the world, that the sparse and inaccu¬ 
rate observations of the facts concerning the pointing of 
the compass-needle were set in order by Edmund Halley, 
Astronomer Royal of England. 
Gilbert of Colchester, quitting the opinions of his genera¬ 
tion concerning magnetic mountains, or a certain magnetic 
rock, or a distant phantom pole of the world controlling the 
movement of the compass-needle, became the Galileo of 
Terrestrial Magnetism by ascribing, in the first great work 
on Physical Science that ever appeared in England, tfie 
magnetic action of the earth itself as the true cause of the 
variation of the compass, and, by expressing the perception 
that the facts of terrestrial magnetism could be accounted 
