Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/26

 of Naples the Amalfians were the first (so it is said) to construct the mariners' compass: and as Flavius Blondus says the Amalfians boast, not without reason, that they were taught by a certain citizen, Johannes Goia, in the year thirteen hundred after the birth of Christ. That town is situated in the kingdom of Naples not far from Salerno, near the promontory of Minerva; and Charles V. bestowed that principality on Andrea Doria, that great Admiral, on account of his signal naval services. Indeed it is plain that no invention of man's device has ever done more for mankind than the compass: some notwithstanding consider that it was discovered by others previously and used in navigation, judging from ancient writings and certain arguments and conjectures. The knowledge of the little mariners' compass seems to have been brought into Italy by Paolo, the Venetian, who learned the art of the compass in the Chinas about the year MCCLX.; yet I do not wish the Amalfians to be deprived of an honour so great as that of having first made the construction common in the Mediterranean Sea. Goropius attributes the discovery to the Cimbri or Teutons, forsooth because the names of the thirty-two winds inscribed on the compass are pronounced in the German tongue by all ship-masters, whether they be French, British, or Spaniards; but the Italians describe them in their own vernacular. Some think that Solomon, king of Judæa, was acquaint with the use of the mariners' compass, and made it known to his ship-masters in the long voyages when they brought back such a power of gold from the West Indies: whence also, from the Hebrew word Parvaim, Arias Montanus maintains that the gold-abounding regions of Peru are named But it is more likely to have come from the coast of lower Æthiopia, from the region of Cephala, as others relate. Yet that account seems to be less true, inasmuch as the Phœnicians, on the frontier of Judæa, who were most skilled in navigation in former ages (a people whose talents, work, and counsel Solomon made use of in constructing ships and in the actual expeditions, as well as in other operations), were ignorant of magnetick aid, the art of the mariners' compass: For had it been in use amongst them, without doubt the Greeks and also Italians and all barbarians would have understood a thing so necessary and made famous by common use; nor could matters of much repute, very easily known, and so highly requisite ever have perished in oblivion; but either the learning would have been handed down to posterity, or some memorial of it would be extant in writing. Sebastian Cabot was the first to discover that the magnetick iron varied. Gonzalus Oviedus is the first to write, as he does in the Historia, that in the south of the Azores it does not vary. Fernelius in his book De Abditis Rerum Causis says that in the loadstone there is a hidden and abstruse cause, elsewhere calling it celestial; and he brings forth nothing but the unknown by means of what is still more unknown.