Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/25

 Matthæus Silvaticus, Hermolaus Barbarus, Camillus Leonhardus, Cornelius Agrippa, Fallopius, Johannes Langius, Cardinal Cusan, Hannibal Rosetius Calaber; by all of whom the subject is treated very negligently, while they merely repeat other people's fictions and ravings. Matthiolus compares the alluring powers of the loadstone which pass through iron materials, with the mischief of the torpedo, whose venom passes through bodies and spreads imperceptibly; Guilielmus Pateanus in his Ratio Purgantium Medicamentorum discusses the loadstone briefly and learnedly. Thomas Erastus, knowing little of magnetical nature, finds in the loadstone weak arguments against Paracelsus; Georgius Agricola, like Encelius and other metallurgists, merely states the facts; Alexander Aphrodiseus in his Problemata considers the question of the loadstone inexplicable; Lucretius Carus, the poet of the Epicurean school, considers that an attraction is brought about in this way: that as from all things there is an efflux of very minute bodies, so from the iron atoms flow into the space emptied by the elements of the loadstone, between the iron and the loadstone, and that as soon as they have begun to stream towards the loadstone, the iron follows, its corpuscles being entangled. To much the same effect Johannes Costæus adduces a passage from Plutarch; Thomas Aquinas, writing briefly on the loadstone in Chapter VII. of his Physica, touches not amiss on its nature, and with his divine and clear intellect would have published much more, had he been conversant with magnetick experiments. Plato thinks the virtue divine. But when three or four hundred years afterwards, the magnetick movement to North and South was discovered or again recognized by men, many learned men attempted, each according to the bent of his own mind, either by wonder and praise, or by some sort of reasonings, to throw light upon a virtue so notable, and so needful for the use of mankind. Of more modern authors a great number have striven to show what is the cause of this direction and movement to North and South, and to understand this great miracle of nature, and to disclose it to others: but they have lost both their oil and their pains; for, not being practised in the subjects of nature, and being misled by certain false physical systems, they adopted as theirs, from books only, without magnetical experiments, certain inferences based on vain opinions, and many things that are not, dreaming old wives' tales. Marsilius Ficinus ruminates over the ancient opinions, and in order to show the reason of the direction seeks the cause in the heavenly constellation of the Bear, supposing the virtue of the Bear to prevail in the stone and to be transferred to the iron. Paracelsus asserted that there are stars, endowed with the power of the loadstone, which attract to themselves iron. Levinus Lemnius describes and praises the compass, and infers its antiquity on certain grounds; he does not divulge the hidden miracle which he propounds. In the kingdom