leaned at once from the following short paragraph, in which
Brother Potamian, of Manhattan College, in his brief, striking
introduction to the letter of Petrus Peregrinus describing the first
conception of a dynamo, condenses the references to magnetic
manifestions that are found in the literature of the time. [Footnote
39]

[Footnote 39: The Letter of Petrus Peregrinus, N. Y., 1904.]

Most of the writers he mentions were not scientists in the ordinary
sense of the word, but were literary men; and the fact that these
references occur, shows very clearly that there must have been
widespread interest in such scientific phenomena, since they had
attracted the {308} attention of literary writers, who would not have
spoken of them doubtless, but that they knew that in this they would
be satisfying as well as exciting public interest.

"Abbot Neckam, the Augustinian (1157-1217), distinguished between
the properties of the two ends of the lodestone, and gives in his De
Utensilibus what is perhaps the earliest reference to the mariner's
compass that we have. Albertus Magnus, the Dominican (1193-1230),
in his treatise De Mineralibus, enumerates different kinds of
natural magnets and states some of the properties commonly
attributed to them; the minstrel, Guyot de Provins, in a famous
satirical poem written about 1208, refers to the directive quality
of the lodestone and its use in navigation, as do also Cardinal de
Vitry in his Historia Orientalis (1215-1220); Brunetto Latini, poet,
orator and philosopher (the teacher of Dante), in his Tresor des
Sciences, a veritable library, written in Paris in 1260; Raymond
Lully, the enlightened Doctor, in his treatise, De Contemplatione,
begun in 1272; and Guido Guinicelli, the poet-priest of Bologna, who
died in 1276."

All of these writers, it may be said, with a single exception, were
clergymen, and some of them were very prominent ecclesiastics in their
time.

The present generation has not as yet quite got over the bad habit of
making fun of these medieval thinkers for having accepted the idea of
the transmutation of metals and searched so assiduously for the
philosopher's stone. This supposed absurdity has for most scientific
minds during the nineteenth century been quite enough of itself,
without more ado, to stamp the generations of the Middle Ages who
accepted it, as utterly lacking, if not in common sense, at least in
serious reasoning power. A