Page:Hans Christian Ørsted - The Soul in Nature - Horner - 1852.djvu/20

Rh in the most important towns in the country. In 1823–24 he delivered a course of French lectures; and in 1828 travelled in Norway, and also visited Berlin, where he made an address in the Society of Naturalists, as he did likewise in Hamburgh in 1830. In 1834 he visited Gauss in Göttingen, that he might become better acquainted with his recent observations on magnetism, by which he was impelled to establish a magnetic observatory in Copenhagen. He took an active part in the Scandinavian meetings of Naturalists, which since the year 1839 had met every three years in one of the northern kingdoms. He attended the meeting at Gotheborg in 1839, and those at Copenhagen in 1840 and 1847; the Stockholm meeting in 1842, and that at Christiania in 1844. The principal speeches and papers he delivered, are published in the following volume. In 1836 he again visited Paris and England, and attended the Scientific Meeting at Southampton in September of that year. At the closing General Meeting the following words were spoken by Sir John Herschel, which may be inserted here to show the appreciation in which Professor Oersted was held by the philosophers of England:—

"In science there was but one direction which the needle would take, when pointed towards the European continent, and that was towards his esteemed friend Professor Oersted. He knew not how to speak of him in his presence, without violating some of that sanctity by which, as an individual, he was surrounded. To look at his calm manner, who could think that he wielded such an intense power, capable of altering the whole state of science, and almost convulsing the knowledge of the world, He had at this meeting developed to them some of those recondite and remarkable powers which he had been himself the first to discover, and which went almost to the extent of obliging them to alter their views on the most ordinary laws of force and of motion. He