forces through the
presence & contact of the stone, even when solid bodies intervene. Iron
that has been touched, acts anew on another piece of iron by contact, &
adapts it for magnetick movements, & this again a third. But if you rub
with a loadstone any other metal, or wood, or bones, or glass, as they will
not be moved toward any particular and determinate quarter of heaven, nor
be attracted by any magnetick body, so they are able not to impart any
magnetick property to other bodies or to iron itself by attrition, & by
infection. Loadstone differs from iron ore, as also from some weaker
magnets, in that when molten in the furnace into a ferric & metallick fused
mass, it does not so readily flow & dissolve into metal; but is sometimes
burnt to ashes in large furnaces; a result which it is reasonable to
suppose arises from its having some kind of sulphureous matter mixed with
it, or from its own excellence & simpler nature, or from the likeness &
common form which it has with the common mother, the Great Magnet. For
earths, and iron stones, magnets abounding in metal, are the more imbued &
marred with excrementitious metallick humours, and earthy corruptions of
substance, as numbers of loadstones are weaker from the mine; hence they
are a little further remote from the common mother, & are degenerate, &
when smelted in the furnace undergo fusion more easily, & give out a more
certain metallick product, & a metal that is softer, not a tough steel. The
majority of loadstones (if not unfairly burnt[101]) yield in the furnace a
very excellent iron. But iron ore also agrees in all those primary
qualities with loadstone; for both, being nearer and more closely akin to
the earth above all bodies known to us, have in themselves {39} a magnetick
substance, & one that is more homogenic, true & cognate with the globe of
the earth; less infested & spoiled by foreign blemish; less confused with
the outgrowths of earth's surface, & less debased by corrupt products. And
for this reason Aristotle in the fourth book of his _Meteora_ seems not
unfairly to separate iron from all the rest of the metals. Gold, he says,
silver, copper, tin, lead, belong to water; but iron is of the earth.
Galen, in the fourth chapter of _De Facultatibus Simplicium
Medicamentorum_, says that iron is an earthy & dense body. Accordingly a
strong loadstone is on our showing especially of the earth: the next place
is occupied by iron ore or weaker loadstone; so th