Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/46

 (that it may the better serve for various trades) it is tempered variously by being skilfully besmeared. Baptista Porta expounds this art in book 13 of his Magia Naturalis. Thus this ferric and telluric nature is included and taken up in various bodies of stones, ores, and earths; so too it differs in aspect, in form, and in efficiency. Art smelts it by various processes, improves it, and turns it, above all material substances, to the service of man in trades and appliances without end. One kind of iron is adapted for breastplates, another serves as a defence against shot, another protects against swords and curved blades (commonly called scimitars), another is used for making swords, another for horseshoes. From iron are made nails, hinges, bolts, saws, keys, grids, doors, folding-doors, spades, rods, pitchforks, hooks, barbs, tridents, pots, tripods, anvils, hammers, wedges, chains, hand-cuffs, fetters, hoes, mattocks, sickles, baskets, shovels, harrows, planes, rakes, ploughshares, forks, pans, dishes, ladles, spoons, spits, knives, daggers, swords, axes, darts, javelins, lances, spears, anchors, and much ship's gear. Besides these, balls, darts, pikes, breastplates, helmets, cuirasses, horseshoes, greaves, wire, strings of musical instruments, chairs, portcullises, bows, catapults, and (pests of human kind) cannon, muskets, and cannon-balls, with endless instruments unknown to the Latins: which things I have rehearsed in order that it may be understood how great is the use of iron, which surpasses a hundred times that of all the other metals; and is day by day being wrought by metal-workers whose stithies are found in almost every village. For this is the foremost of metals, subserving many and the greatest needs of man, and abounds in the earth above all other metals, and is predominant. Wherefore those Chemists are fools[76] who think that nature's will is to perfect all metals into gold; she might as well be making ready to change all stones to diamonds, since diamond surpasses all in splendour and hardness, because gold excels in splendour, gravity, and density, being invincible against all deterioration. Iron as dug up is therefore, like iron that has been smelted, a metal, differing a little indeed from the primary homogenic terrestrial body, owing to the metallick humour it has imbibed; yet not so alien as that it will not, after the manner of refined matter, admit largely of the magnetick forces, and may be associated with that prepotent form belonging to the earth, and yield to it a due submission.