Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/60

 and of the terrestrial globe; which properties they also impart to each other, and increase, confirm, receive, and retain each other's forces. The stronger fortifies the weaker, not as though aught were taken away from its own substance, or its proper vigour, nor because any corporeal substance is imparted, but the dormant virtue of the one is aroused by the other, without loss. For if with a single small stone you touch a thousand bits of iron for the use of mariners, that loadstone attracts iron no less strongly than before; with the same stone weighing one pound, any one will be able to suspend in the air a thousand pounds of iron. For if any one were to fix high up on the walls so many iron nails of so great a weight, & were to apply to them the same number of nails touched, according to the art, by a loadstone, they would all be seen to hang in the air through the force of one small stone. So this is not solely the action, labour, or outlay of the loadstone; but the iron, which is in a sense an extract from loadstone, and a fusion of loadstone into metal, & conceives vigour from it, & by proximity strengthens the magnetick faculties, doth itself, from whatever lode it may have come, raise its own inborn forces through the presence & contact of the stone, even when solid bodies intervene. Iron that has been touched, acts anew on another piece of iron by contact, & adapts it for magnetick movements, & this again a third. But if you rub with a loadstone any other metal, or wood, or bones, or glass, as they will not be moved toward any particular and determinate quarter of heaven, nor be attracted by any magnetick body, so they are able not to impart any magnetick property to other bodies or to iron itself by attrition, & by infection. Loadstone differs from iron ore, as also from some weaker magnets, in that when molten in the furnace into a ferric & metallick fused mass, it does not so readily flow & dissolve into metal; but is sometimes burnt to ashes in large furnaces; a result which it is reasonable to suppose arises from its having some kind of sulphureous matter mixed with it, or from its own excellence & simpler nature, or from the likeness & common form which it has with the common mother, the Great Magnet. For earths, and iron stones, magnets abounding in metal, are the more imbued & marred with excrementitious metallick humours, and earthy corruptions of substance, as numbers of loadstones are weaker from the mine; hence they are a little further remote from the common mother, & are degenerate, & when smelted in the furnace undergo fusion more easily, & give out a more certain metallick product, & a metal that is softer, not a tough steel. The majority of loadstones (if not unfairly burnt) yield in the furnace a very excellent iron. But iron ore also agrees in all those primary qualities with loadstone; for both, being nearer and more closely akin to the earth above all bodies known to us, have in themselves