Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/423

Rh of general conversation in the college, and lie participated with ranch interest in the discussions that took place in the Tutors' Club over the views of Prof. Twining and Prof. Olmsted concerning the origin of the mysterious bodies. In the organization of the department committees of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1834, Mr. Loomis was assigned to that on mathematics and natural philosophy. From this time on he devoted himself predominantly to those branches of science in which he became distinguished.

He began systematic studies of the earth's magnetism during his tutorship in Yale College, setting up the variation compass of the institution in the north window of his room and making hourly observations of it, usually for seventeen hours of a single day, for thirteen months. The results of these observations—the only published American observations, except some made by Prof. Bache during ten days in 1833, that were made before 1834—were published in Silliman's Journal in 1836. He also undertook the collection of observations of magnetic declination in the United States and the construction of a magnetic chart of the country. This work was published about 1830, and in a revised second edition, with additional observations, two years later. Prof. Bache, comparing Mr. Loomis's results with those obtained by himself sixteen years later under much more favorable circumstances for exact observation and collation, declared that, when proper allowance had been made for secular changes, the agreement was remarkable. The first charts contained but few records of dip; but after removing to Western Reserve College Prof. Loomis undertook, with a dipping needle which he had procured in Europe, systematic observations of this feature. They were continued for several years at seventy stations in thirteen States, and the results were published in successive papers in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society.

Prof. Loomis's interest in astronomy apparently dates from the meteoric shower of 1833. He read a paper on that subject before the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in October, 1834, in which he reviewed the concerted observations made by Brandes and his pupils in Germany in 1823, and deduced from them an argument in favor of the cosmic origin of the shooting stars. In November of the same year he made similar observations at New Haven in concert with Prof. Twining who was stationed near West Point, N. Y., the first observations of the kind undertaken in America.

With the new five-inch telescope, the largest then in the country, given to Yale College by Mr. Sheldon Clark, Prof. Olmsted and Mr. Loomis obtained the first sight of Halley's comet on its predicted return in 1835, and observed it throughout its course.