It is one of the gems in the crown of Columbus, that he observed, measured and recorded this strange behavior of the magnetic needle in his narrative of the voyage. True, he did not notice it until he was far out on the trackless ocean. A week had elapsed since he left the lordly Teneriffe, and a few days since the mountainous outline of Gomera had disappeared from sight. The memorable night was that of September 13th, 1492. There was no mistaking it; the needle of the _Santa Maria_ pointed a little west of north instead of due north. Some days later, on September 17th, the pilots, having taken the sun's amplitude, reported that the variation had reached a whole point of the compass, the alarming amount of 11 degrees. The surprise and anxiety which Columbus manifested on those occasions may be taken as indications that the phenomenon was new to him. As a matter of fact, however, his needles were not true even at the outset of the voyage from the port of Palos, where, though no one was aware of it, they pointed about 3° _east_ of north. This angle diminished from day to day as the Admiral kept the prow of his caravel directed to the west, until it vanished altogether, after which the needles veered to the _west_, and kept moving westward for a time as the flag-ship proceeded on her voyage. [Illustration: FIG. 4 Magnetic Declination in London in 1580 and in 1907] Columbus thus determined a place on the Atlantic in which the magnetic meridian coincided with the geographical and in which the needle stood true to the pole. Six years later, in 1498, Sebastian Cabot found another place on the same ocean, a little further north, in which the compass lay exactly in the north-and-south line. These two observations, one by Columbus and the other by Cabot, sufficed to determine the position of the _agonic line_, or line of no variation, for that locality and epoch. The _Columbian_ line acquired at once considerable importance, in the geographical and the political world, because of the proposal that was made to discard the Island of Ferro and take it for the prime meridian from which longitude would be reckoned east and west, and also because it was selected by Pope Alexander VI. to serve as a line of reference in settling the rival claims of the kingdoms of Portugal and Castile with regard to their respective discoveries. It was decided that all recently discovered lands lying to the east of that line should belong to Portugal; and those to the west, to Castile. The line of no variation, like all other isomagnetic lines, has shifted its position with time, so that it runs to-day considerably to the west of the place assigned to it by Columbus in 1492 and by the Papal Bull of the following year.