n it does the
loadstone. Cardan asks why no other metal is attracted by any other stone;
because (he replies) no metal is so cold as iron; as if indeed cold were
the cause of the attraction, or as if iron were much colder than lead,
which neither follows nor is deflected towards a loadstone. {63} But that
is a chilly story, and worse than an old woman's tale. So also is the
notion that the loadstone is alive and that iron is its food. But how does
the loadstone feed on the iron, when the filings in which it is kept are
neither consumed nor become lighter? Cornelius Gemma, _Cosmographia_, Bk.
X.[151], holds that the loadstone draws iron to it by insensible rays, to
which opinion he conjoins a story of a sucking fish and another about an
antelope. Guilielmus Puteanus[152] derives it, "not from any property of
the whole substance unknown to any one and which cannot be demonstrated in
any way (as Galen, and after him almost all the physicians, have asserted),
but from the essential nature of the thing itself, as if moving from the
first by itself, and, as it were, by its own most powerful nature and from
that innate temperament, as it were an instrument, which its substance, its
effective nature uses in its operations, or a secondary cause and deprived
of its intermediary"; so the loadstone attracts the iron not without a
physical cause and for the sake of some good. But there is no such thing in
other substances springing from some material form; unless it were primary,
which he does not recognize. But certes good is shown to the loadstone by
the stroke of the iron (as it were, association with a friend); yet it
cannot either be discovered or conceived how that disposition may be the
instrument of form. For what can temperament do in magnetical motions,
which must be compared with the fixed, definite, constant motions of the
stars, at great distances in case of the interposition of very dense and
thick bodies? To Baptista Porta[153] the loadstone seems a sort of mixture
of stone and iron, in such a way that it is an iron stone or stony iron.
"But I think" (he says) "the Loadstone is a mixture of stone and iron, as
an iron stone, or a stone of iron. Yet do not think the stone is so changed
into iron, as to lose its own Nature, nor that the iron is so drowned in
the stone, but it preserves itself; and whilst one labours to get the
victory of the other, the attraction is made by the combat between them. In
that body there is mor