Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/85

 But that is a chilly story, and worse than an old woman's tale. So also is the notion that the loadstone is alive and that iron is its food. But how does the loadstone feed on the iron, when the filings in which it is kept are neither consumed nor become lighter? , Cosmographia, Bk. X., holds that the loadstone draws iron to it by insensible rays, to which opinion he conjoins a story of a sucking fish and another about an antelope. Guilielmus Puteanus derives it, "not from any property of the whole substance unknown to any one and which cannot be demonstrated in any way (as Galen, and after him almost all the physicians, have asserted), but from the essential nature of the thing itself, as if moving from the first by itself, and, as it were, by its own most powerful nature and from that innate temperament, as it were an instrument, which its substance, its effective nature uses in its operations, or a secondary cause and deprived of its intermediary"; so the loadstone attracts the iron not without a physical cause and for the sake of some good. But there is no such thing in other substances springing from some material form; unless it were primary, which he does not recognize. But certes good is shown to the loadstone by the stroke of the iron (as it were, association with a friend); yet it cannot either be discovered or conceived how that disposition may be the instrument of form. For what can temperament do in magnetical motions, which must be compared with the fixed, definite, constant motions of the stars, at great distances in case of the interposition of very dense and thick bodies? To Baptista Porta the loadstone seems a sort of mixture of stone and iron, in such a way that it is an iron stone or stony iron. "But I think" (he says) "the Loadstone is a mixture of stone and iron, as an iron stone, or a stone of iron. Yet do not think the stone is so changed into iron, as to lose its own Nature, nor that the iron is so drowned in the stone, but it preserves itself; and whilst one labours to get the victory of the other, the attraction is made by the combat between them. In that body there is more of the stone than of iron; and therefore the iron, that it may not be subdued by the stone, desires the force and company of iron; that being not able to resist alone, it may be able by more help to defend itself The Loadstone draws not stones, because it wants them not, for there is stone enough in the body of it; and if one Loadstone draw another, it is not for the stone, but for the iron that is in it." As if in the loadstone the iron were a distinct body and not mixed up as the other metals in their ores! And that these, being so mixed up, should fight with one another, and should extend their quarrel, and that in consequence of the battle auxiliary forces should be called in, is indeed absurd. But iron itself, when excited by a loadstone, seizes iron no less strongly than the loadstone. Therefore those fights, seditions, and conspiracies in the stone, as if it were nursing up perpetual quarrels,