Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/84

 Such a reason Plutarch also alleges in the Quæstiones Platonicæ; That that stone gives off heavy exhalations, whereby the adjacent air, being impelled along, condenses that which is in front of it; and that air, being driven round in an orbe and reverting to the place it had vacated, drags the iron forcibly along with it. The following explanation of the virtues of the loadstone and of amber is propounded by Johannes Costæus of Lodi. For he would have it that "there is mutual work and mutual result, and therefore the motion is partly due to the attraction of the loadstone and partly to a spontaneous movement on the part of the iron: For as we say that vapours issuing from the loadstone hasten by their own nature to attract the iron, so also the air repelled by the vapours, whilst seeking a place for itself, is turned back, and when turned back, it impels the iron, lifts it up, as it were, and carries it along; the iron being of itself also excited somehow. So by being drawn out and by a spontaneous motion, and by striking against another substance, there is in some way produced a composite motion, which motion would nevertheless be rightly referred to attraction, because the terminus from which this motion invariably begins is the same terminus at which it ends, which is the characteristic proper of an attraction." There is certainly a mutual action, not an operation, nor does the loadstone attract in that way; nor is there any impulsion. But neither is there that origination of the motion by the vapours, and the turning of them back, which opinion of Epicurus has so often been quoted by others. Galen errs in his De Naturalibus Facultatibus, Book I., chap. 14, when he expresses the view that whatever agents draw out either the venom of serpents or darts also exhibit the same power as the loadstone. Now of what sort may be the attraction of such medicaments (if indeed it may be called attraction) we shall consider elsewhere. Drugs against poisons or darts have no relation to, no similitude with, the action of magnetical bodies. The followers of Galen (who hold that purgative medicaments attract because of similitude of substance) say that bodies are attracted on account of similitude, not identity, of substance; wherefore the loadstone draws iron, but iron does not draw iron. But we declare and prove that this happens in primary bodies, and in those bodies that are pretty closely related to them and especially like in kind one to another, on account of their identity; wherefore also loadstone draws loadstone and likewise iron iron; every really true earth draws earth; and iron fortified by a loadstone within the orbe of whose virtue it is placed draws iron more strongly than it does the loadstone. Cardan asks why no other metal is attracted by any other stone; because (he replies) no metal is so cold as iron; as if indeed cold were the cause of the attraction, or as if iron were much colder than lead, which neither follows nor is deflected towards a loadstone.