Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/27

 For clumsy, and meagre, and pointless is his inquiry into hidden causes. The ingenious Fracastorio, a distinguished philosopher, in seeking the reason for the direction of the loadstone, feigns Hyperborean magnetick mountains attracting magnetical things of iron: this view, which has found acceptance in part by others, is followed by many authors and finds a place not in their writings only, but in geographical tables, marine charts, and maps of the globe: dreaming, as they do, of magnetick poles and huge rocks, different from the poles of the earth. More than two hundred years earlier than Fracastorio there exists a little work, fairly learned for the time, going under the name of one Peter Peregrinus, which some consider to have originated from the views of Roger Bacon, the Englishman of Oxford: In which book causes for magnetick direction are sought from the poles of the heaven and from the heaven itself. From this Peter Peregrinus, Johannes Taisnier of Hainault extracted materials for a little book, and published it as new. Cardan talks much of the rising of the star in the tail of the Greater Bear, and has attributed to its rising the cause of the variation: supposing that the variation is always the same, from the rising of the star. But the difference of the variation according to the change of position, and the changes which occur in many places, and are even irregular in southern regions, preclude the influence of one particular star at its northern rising. The College of Coimbra seeks the cause in some part of the heaven near the pole: Scaliger in section CXXXI. of his Exercitationes on Cardan suggests a heavenly cause unknown to himself, and terrestrial loadstones nowhere yet discovered. A cause not due to those sideritic mountains named above, but to that power which fashioned them, namely that portion of the heaven which overhangs that northern point. This view is garnished with a wealth of words by that erudite man, and crowned with many marginal subtilities; but with reasonings not so subtile. Martin Cortes considers that there is a place of attraction beyond the poles, which he judges to be the moving heavens. One Bessardus, a Frenchman, with no less folly notes the pole of the zodiack. Jacobus Severtius, of Paris, while quoting a few points, fashions new errors as to loadstones of different parts of the earth being different in direction: and also as to there being eastern and western parts of the loadstone. Robert Norman, an Englishman, fixes a point and region respective, not attractive; to which the magnetical iron is collimated, but is not itself attracted. Franciscus Maurolycus treats of a few problems on the loadstone, taking the trite views of others, and avers that the variation is due to a certain magnetical island mentioned by Olaus Magnus. Josephus Acosta, though quite ignorant about the loadstone, nevertheless pours forth vapid talk upon the loadstone. Livio Sanuto in his Italian Geographia, discusses at length the question whether the prime magnetick