ation: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MARINO SANUTO. C. 1306.
(SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

In fact, compass, astrolabe, timepiece, and charts, were all in use on
the Mediterranean about 1400, just as they were to be found among the
Arab traders of the Indian Ocean.

In this section it will be enough to glance hastily at the later and
growingly independent science of Christendom, from the time that it
ceased merely to follow the lead of Islam, and thought and even invented
for itself. In another chapter we have seen something of the lasting and
penetrating influence of Greek and Moslem and Hindu tradition upon the
Western thought, which has conquered by absorbing all its rivals; we
must not forget that some original self-reliant work in geographical
theory not less than in practical exploration is absolutely needed to
explain the very fact of Prince Henry and his life--a student's life,
far more even than a statesman's. And after all, the invention of
instruments, the drawing of maps and globes, the reckoning of distances,
is not less practical than the most daring and successful travel. For
navigation, the first and prime demand is a means of safety, some power
of knowing where you stand and where to go, such as was given to sailors
by the use of the magnet.

"Prima dedit nautis usum magnetis Amalphis," says Beccadelli of Palermo,
but the earliest mention of the "Black ugly stone" in the West is traced
to an Englishman. Alexander Neckam, a monk of St. Albans, writing about
1180 on "The Natures Of Things," tells us of it as commonly used by
sailors, not merely as the secret of the learned. "When they cannot see
the sun clearly in cloudy weather, or at night, and cannot tell which
way their prow is tending, they put a Needle above a Magnet which
revolves till its point looks North and then stops." So the satirist,
Guyot de Provins, in his _Bible_ of about 1210, wishes the Pope were as
safe a point to steer by in Faith as the North Star in sailing, "which
mariners can keep ahead of them, without sight of it, only by the
pointing of a needle floating on a straw in water, once touched by the
Magnet."

It might be supposed from this not merely that the magnet was in use at
the end of the twelfth century, but that it had been known to a few
_savants_ much earlier; yet when Dante's tutor, Brunetto Latini, visits
Roger Bacon at Oxford about 1258, and is shown the black stone, he
speaks of it as new and wonderful, but certain, if used, to aw