On the lodestone and magnetic bodies and on the great magnet the earth : a new physiology demonstrated with many arguments and experiments / William Gilbert of Colchester, physician of London ... a translation by P. Fleury Mottelay.

  • Gilbert, William, 1544-1603.
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the lodestone and magnetic bodies and on the great magnet the earth : a new physiology demonstrated with many arguments and experiments / William Gilbert of Colchester, physician of London ... a translation by P. Fleury Mottelay. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    accepted—even as evil and noxious plants ever have the most luxuriant growth—down to our day, being propagated in the writings of many authors who, to the end that their volumes might grow to the desired bulk, do write and copy all sorts about ever so many things of which they know naught for cer- tain in the light of experience. Such fables about the loadstone even Georgius Agricola, a man that has deserved well indeed of letters, has inserted as truthful history in his books De Natura Fossilium, putting his trust in others' writings.1 Ga- len, in the ninth book of his De Simplicium Medicamentorum Facultatibus, recognizes its medicinal virtue, and its natural power of attracting iron, in the first book of his De Naturalibus Facultatibus; but he knew not the cause, any more than Dioscorides before him, nor did he seek further. But his translator Matthiolus furbishes again the garlic and diamond story, and further brings in the fable of Mahomet's shrine hav- ing an arched roof of magnets so that the people might be fooled by the trick of the coffin suspended in air, as though 'twere some divine miracle. But this is shown to be false by the reports of travellers. Pliny, however, records that the architect Chinocrates began to put an arched roof of load- stone on the temple of Arsinoe at Alexandria, so that her effigy in iron might seem to be suspended in air: in the meantime the architect died, as also Ptolemy, who had or- dered the work to be done in honor of his sister.2 But little 1 See account of the life and writings of George Agricola in the sixth chapter of The History of Chemistry, by Dr. Thomas Thomson, who calls him one of the most extraordinary men as well as one of the greatest promoters of chemistry that have ever existed, and who pronounces Agricola's De Re Metallica as, beyond comparison, the most valuable chemical work which the sixteenth century produced. '2 So it is reported by Ruffinus, that in the Temple of Serapis there was an iron chariot suspended by Loadstones in the ayr; which stones removed, the chariot fell and dashed into pieces. The like doth Beda report of Bellerophon's