Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/61

 a magnetick substance, & one that is more homogenic, true & cognate with the globe of the earth; less infested & spoiled by foreign blemish; less confused with the outgrowths of earth's surface, & less debased by corrupt products. And for this reason Aristotle in the fourth book of his Meteora seems not unfairly to separate iron from all the rest of the metals. Gold, he says, silver, copper, tin, lead, belong to water; but iron is of the earth. Galen, in the fourth chapter of De Facultatibus Simplicium Medicamentorum, says that iron is an earthy & dense body. Accordingly a strong loadstone is on our showing especially of the earth: the next place is occupied by iron ore or weaker loadstone; so the loadstone is by nature and origin of iron, and it and magnetick iron are both one in kind. Iron ore yields iron in furnaces; loadstone also pours forth iron in the furnaces, but of a much more excellent sort, that which is called steel or blade-edge; and the better sort of iron ore is a weak loadstone, the best loadstone being a most excellent ore of iron, in which, as is to be shown by us, the primary properties are grand and conspicuous. Weaker loadstone or iron ore is that in which these properties are more obscure, feeble, and are scarce perceptible to the senses.

RIOR to bringing forward the causes of magnetical motions, & laying open the proofs of things hidden for so many ages, & our experiments (the true foundations of terrestrial philosophy), we have to establish & present to the view of the learned our New & unheard of doctrine about the earth; and this, when argued by us on the grounds of its probability, with subsequent