The English Compass is, however, believed with good reason to be the best yet contrived. It has grown up to its present excellence by slow degrees. Human ingenuity has been taxed to its utmost, and it has passed to its present perfection through the various trials of needles of all sorts of shapes swung in all sorts of ways, and by springs, and floating cards, modifying the instrument to the varying conditions of a small boat tossing on waves, or a line of battle ship jarring under the recoil of a broadside. And now we find our Compass-needle made of iron that, being got from the Swedish mines, has travelled to Strasbourg to be prepared for clock springs; thence to Paris, to be still more highly wrought by the watchmaker; and then to London, to take its sea-going shape. Four bars of this choice metal, or of shear-steel of equally fine quality, are ranged edgewise under a card, thickened and stiffened yet kept transparent by a sheet of mica, brought from the Russian mines; this card moves upon a point made of a metal harder than steel, and incapable of corrosion; and which sometimes, under the name of Iridium, but more correctly under that of “native alloy,” is found by the refiners as they smelt the platinum and silver gained from the Ural Mountains or the mines of Spain. The Iridium or alloy comes to the workshop in the tiniest of glass bottles—bottles as small round as a goose-quill, and about an inch long—in morsels not much bigger than a pin’s head, and weighing each less than half a grain. Some of these prove too soft, some too spongy, some too brittle, but at last one is found hard and good, and it is soldered upon the pivot, that, when sharpened and polished, is to work upon a cap, formed of a ruby, brought from the East. A bowl of the metal suggested by the French philosopher being prepared, from the produce of the mines of Cornwall; and the science of the English philosopher, and the skill of the English workman, having brought all these things into their proper shape and places; we have, as the result, the Standard Compass, whose fitness to guide her Majesty’s ship the Unutterable, we have just seen tested by Captain Johnson at the Woolwich Compass Observatory.