Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/48

 true any expert in the arts of metals and chemistry will easily find. Beside that which has ferruginous nature, and the metallick lode, there is another ferric substance which does not yield the metal in this way because its thin humour is burnt out by fierce fires, and it is changed into an iron slag like that which is separated from the metal in the first furnaces. And of this kind is all clay and argillaceous earth, such as that which apparently forms a large part of the whole of our island of Britain: all of which, if subjected very vehemently to intense heat, exhibits a ferric and metallick body, or passes into ferric vitreous matter, as can be easily seen in buildings in bricks baked from clay, which, when placed next the fires in the open kilns (which our folk call clamps) and burned, present an iron vitrification, black at the other end. Moreover all those earths as prepared are drawn by the magnet, and like iron are attracted by it. So perpetual and ample is the iron offspring of the terrestrial globe. Georgius Agricola says that almost all mountainous regions are full of its ores, while as we know a rich iron lode is frequently dug in the open country and plains over nearly the whole of England and Ireland; in no other wise than as, says he, iron is dug out of the meadows at the town of Saga in pits driven to a two-foot depth. Nor are the West Indies without their iron lodes, as writers tell us; but the Spaniards, intent upon gold, neglect the toilsome work of iron-founding, and do not search for lodes and mines abounding in iron. It is probable that nature and the globe of the earth are not able to hide, and are evermore bringing to the light of day, a great mass of inborn matter, and are not invariably obstructed by the settling of mixtures and efflorescences at the earth's surface. It is not only in the common mother (the terrestrial globe) that iron is produced, but sometimes also in the air from the earth's exhalations, in the highest clouds. It rained iron in Lucania, the year in which M. Crassus was slain. The tale is told, too, that a mass of iron, like slag, fell from the air in the Nethorian forest, near Grina, and they narrate that the mass was many pounds in weight; so that it could neither be conveyed to that place, on account of its weight, nor be brought away by cart, the place being without roads. This happened before the civil war waged between the rival dukes in Saxony. A similar story, too, comes to us from Avicenna. It once rained iron in the Torinese, in various places (Julius Scaliger telling us that he had a piece of it in his house), about three years before that province was taken over by the king. In the year 1510 in the country bordering on the river Abdua (as Cardan writes in his book De Rerum Varietate) there fell from the sky 1200 stones, one weighing 120 pounds, another 30 or 40 pounds, of a rusty iron colour and remarkably hard. These occurrences being rare are regarded as portents, like the showers of earth and stones mentioned in Roman history. But that it ever rained other metals is not re-