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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    of a little volume, which he published for new. Cardan makes much of the star in the tail of Ursa Major; the cause of varia- tion he assigns to its rising, thinking that variation is always certain at the rising of the star. But the difference of varia- tion for change of locality, and the mutations in many places —mutations that even in the southern regions are irregular— preclude this exclusive dominance of one star at its northern rising. The College of Coimbra seeks the cause in some region of the heavens nigh to the pole ; Scaliger, in the 131st of his Exercitationes on Cardan's work De Subtilitate, brings in a celestial cause to himself unknown, and terrestrial loadstones that have nowhere been discovered ; and seeks the cause not in the siderite mountains but in that force which formed them, to wit, in the part of the heavens which overhangs that northern point. This opinion the learned author dresses in abundant verbiage and crowns with many subtile observations in the margin : but his reasons are not so subtile. Martinus Cortesius holds that the seat of the attraction is beyond the poles, and that it is the heavens in motion. One Bessard, a Frenchman, studies the pole of the Zodiac, but to as little pur- pose. Jacobus Severtius, of Paris, after quoting a few obser- vations of others, fashions new errors about loadstones of dif- ferent regions being different in direction, as also about the eastern and western parts of a loadstone. Robert Norman, an Englishman, posits a point and place toward which the magnet looks (but whereto it is) not drawn : toward which magnetized iron, according to him, is collimated, but which does not attract it. Franciscus Maurolycus 1 discusses a few problems regarding the loadstone, adopting the current opinions of others; he believes that the variation is caused by 1 An account of Francis Maurolycus appears in a note, Book I, Chap. XVII, of present work.