Abstract
THIS is a good book, and we are glad to see the subject of magnetism fully treated in a popularly written text-book. It is a second edition of Sir William Snow Harris's rudimentary treatise, with considerable and important additions by the editor. The part of chief importance which is added is Chapter viii., which deals with the more recent progress of terrestrial megnetism. This chapter consists of thirty pages, and the author has managed to condense into that space a wonderfully large amount of interesting, useful, and accurate information on the subject. In so short a space we must be content with results rather than with particulars, but the matter contained in this chapter, in point of importance, accuracy, and exhaustiveness, places the present treatise, as far as terrestrial magnetism is concerned, much before any similar book with which we are acquainted. The correction of the compass in iron ships is entered into in the last chapter. The telegraph is scarcely touched upon, but this perhaps rather belongs to a treatise on electricity. We have a chapter on theories of terrestrial magnetism. The theory of Gauss should never be classed, as it is here, and indeed as it is generally classed, along with theories like those of Halley or Hanstein, or with such things as electro-magnetic theories and the like. The word “theory ”in these cases means quite a different thing from what it means when applied to Gauss's investigations. Hanstein and the like all make some physical hypothesis, which may or may not be the case; but Gauss makes no such assumption at all, except in so far as he supposes that the needle at all parts of the earth's surface is affected by forces due to the same origin, and varying inversely as the square of the distance, which has been experimentally proved to be the law according to which magnetic forces act. He then shows how the effect on a needle can be expressed in terms of an infinite series which is necessarily mathematically convergent and true, and he then uses an approximation to that series, which approximation is justified fully by experiments similar to those made by the late Prof. Forbes at the top and bottom of the Faulhorn. Gauss's theory, then, is a truly scientific theory, inasmuch as it involves no unjustified physical hypothesis, but is a logical deduction from observed facts and established principles, and in this differs radically from the other theories which are too often classed with it. Dr. Noad has been so successful in Chapter viii. that we cannot help wishing he had introduced a chapter also on this subject.
Magnetism.
By Sir W. Snow Harris H. M. Noad. (London: Lock wood and Co.)
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STUART, J. Magnetism . Nature 5, 363 (1872). https://doi.org/10.1038/005363a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/005363a0