meant that worn-out magnets were
used, which had lost their power to point correctly to the pole. Others
had contended that it was through insufficient application of the
loadstone to the iron that it was so devious in its work.

What was thought possible by the early navigators possessed the minds of
all seamen in varying experiments for two centuries and a half. Though
not reaching such satisfactory results as were hoped for, the
expectation did not prove so chimerical as was sometimes imagined when
it was discovered that the lines of variation were neither parallel, nor
straight, nor constant. The line of no variation which Columbus found
near the Azores had moved westward with erratic inclinations, until
to-day it is not far from a straight line from Carolina to Guinea.
Science, beginning with its crude efforts at the hands of Alonzo de
Santa Cruz, in 1530, has so mapped the surface of the globe with
observations of its multifarious freaks of variation, and the changes
are so slow, that a magnetic chart is not a bad guide to-day for
ascertaining the longitude in any latitude for a few years neighbouring
to the date of its records. So science has come around in some measure
to the dreams of Columbus and Cabot.

But this was not the only development which came from this ominous day
in the mid-Atlantic in that September of 1492. The fancy of Columbus was
easily excited, and notions of a change of climate, and even aberration
of the stars were easily imagined by him amid the strange phenomena of
that untracked waste.

While Columbus was suspecting that the north star was somewhat wilfully
shifting from the magnetic pole, now to a distance of 5 deg. and then of
10 deg., the calculations of modern astronomers have gauged the polar
distance existing in 1492 at 3 deg. 28', as against the 1 deg. 20' of to-day.
The confusion of Columbus was very like his confounding an old world
with a new, inasmuch as he supposed it was the pole star and not the
needle which was shifting.

He argued from what he saw, or what he thought he saw, that the line of
no variation marked the beginning of a protuberance of the earth, up
which he ascended as he sailed westerly, and that this was the reason of
the cooler weather which he experienced. He never got over some notions
of this kind, and he believed he found confirmation of them in his later
voyages.

Even as early as the reign of Edward III. of England, Nicholas of Lynn,
a voyager to