great erroneous principle of morals incorporated into their laws; a
principle, the natural and necessary consequence of which had been
the occasion of the bill now before the committee; a principle
enacted by the British Parliament, and sanctioned by the decision of
their highest judicial tribunals, with the express and avowed
purpose of encouraging the subjects of Great Britain to the practice
of defrauding, even by the commission of perjury, the revenues of a
foreign country."

In July, 1840, a memorial was presented to Congress, from the American
Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, asking the aid of government to
carry on a series of magnetic and meteorological observations. This
application was made in cooeperation with the Royal Society of Great
Britain, and at their solicitation, and had for its object an extended
system of magnetic observations at fixed magnetic observatories in
different quarters of the globe. Mr. Adams, having been appointed
chairman of a committee on the memorial, made a report setting forth at
large the motives for concurrence, and the importance of the object
asked for. The following extracts illustrate his comprehensive views and
appreciation of the subject:

"Among the most powerful, most wonderful, and most mysterious agents
in the economy of the physical universe, is the magnet. Its
attractive properties, its perpetual tendency to the poles of the
earth and of the heavens, and its exclusive sympathies with one of
the mineral productions of the earth, have been brought within the
scope of human observation at different periods of the history of
mankind, separated by the distance of many centuries from each
other. The attractive power of the magnet was known in ages of
antiquity so remote that it transcends even the remembrance of the
name of its first discoverer, and the time of its accession to the
mass of human knowledge. Its polarity, or, at least, the application
of that property to the purposes of navigation beyond the sight of
land, was unknown in Europe, and probably throughout the world,
until the twelfth or thirteenth century of the Christian era; and
its horizontal variation from the tendency directly to the pole was
first perceived by Christopher Columbus, in that transcendent voyage
of discovery which gave a new hemisphere to the industry and
intelligence of civilized man