Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/350

340 vast provinces of nature and added them to the domain of science. Bacon was a theorist, Gilbert an investigator. For eighteen years and more he shunned the glare of society and the throbbing excitement of public life; he wrenched himself away from all but the strictest exigencies of his profession, in order to devote himself undistractedly to the pursuit of science. And all this more than twenty years before the appearance of Bacon's Novum Organum, the very work which contains the philosopher's 'large thoughts and lofty phrases' on the value of experiment as a means for the advancement of learning. During that long period Gilbert haunted Colchester, where he delved into the secrets of nature and prepared the materials for his grand work, De Magnete. The publication of this Latin treatise made him known in the universities at home and especially abroad: he was appreciated by all the great physicists and mathematicians of his age; by such men as Sir Kenelm Digby; by William Barlowe, a great 'magneticall' man; by Kepler, the astronomer, who adopted and defended his views; by Galileo himself, who said: 'I extremely admire and envy the author of De Magnete.'

If any one then deserves to be called the founder of the "experimental school of philosophy, we contend that it is not Bacon the thinker and essayist, but Gilbert the methodical worker and fruitful discoverer.

The originality of Gilbert's work and the character of his discoveries, together with the reputation which he enjoyed in the greater seats of learning, ended by giving umbrage to Bacon, and the world saw the strange spectacle of a great chancellor forgetting the teachings of his own philosophy and becoming jealous. He even carried his ill feeling so far as to write belittlingly of the conclusions of his illustrious rival, saying in his De Augmentis Scientiarum that "Gilbert had attempted a general system upon the magnet, endeavoring to build a ship out of materials not sufficient to make the rowing-pins of a boat."

It will be interesting to see what these 'rowing-pins' were, for then we shall have a scale by which to judge the intensity of Bacon's jealousy and the magnitude of his belittling ability.

Gilbert's electrical work is contained in Book II of De Magnete; and we may say at once that the second chapter of that famous book is the first chapter on electricity ever written. Nothing was known before Gilbert's time save the attraction for light bodies observed in rubbed amber and jet.

Gilbert goes to work and devises an instrument to enable him to study readily the electrical behavior of rubbed substances. He called it a Versorium, we should call it an electroscope. "Make to yourself," he says, "a rotating needle of any sort of metal three or four fingers long and pretty light and poised on a sharp point." He then briskly