Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/53

 of which you will afterwards find in the laws of the direction. This too you should understand, and hold firmly in memory, that as a strong loadstone, and iron touched with the same, do not invariably point exactly to the true pole but to the point of the variation; so does a weaker loadstone, and so does the iron, which directs itself by its own forces only, not by those impressed by the stone; and so every ore of iron, and all bodies naturally endowed with something of the iron nature, and prepared, turn to the same point of the horizon, according to the place of the variation in that particular region (if there be any variation therein), and there abide and rest.

RON settles itself toward the North and South; not with one and the same point toward this pole or that: for one end of the piece of ore itself and one extremity also of a wrought-iron wire have a sure and constant destination to the North, the other to the South, whether the iron hang in the air, or float on water, be the iron large rods or thinner wires. Even if it be a little rod, or a wire ten or twenty or more ells in length; one end as a rule is Boreal, the other Austral. If you cut off part of that wire, and if the end of that divided part were Boreal, the other end (which was joined to it) will be Austral. Thus if you divide it into several parts, before making an experiment on the surface of water, you can recognize the vertex. In all of them a Boreal end draws an Austral and repels a Boreal, and contrariwise, according to the laws magnetical. Yet herein wrought iron differs from the loadstone and from its own ore, inasmuch as in an iron ball of any size, such as those used for artillery or cannon, or bullets used for carbines or fowling-pieces, verticity is harder to acquire and is less apparent than in a piece of loadstone, or of ore itself, or than in a round loadstone. But in long and extended pieces of iron a power is at once discerned; the causes of which fact, and the methods by which it acquires its verticity and its poles without use of a loadstone, as well as the reasons for all the other obscure features of verticity, we shall set forth in describing the motion of direction.