heir
own experience. Such fables of the loadstone even Georgius Agricola
himself, most distinguished in letters, relying on the writings of others,
has embodied as actual history in his books _De Natura Fossilium_. Galen
noted its medicinal power in the ninth book of his _De Simplicium
Medicamentorum Facultatibus_, and its natural property of attracting iron
in the first book of _De Naturalibus Facultatibus_; but he failed to
recognize the cause, as Dioscorides before him, nor made further inquiry.
But his commentator Matthiolus repeats the story of the garlick and the
diamond, and moreover introduces Mahomet's shrine vaulted with
loadstones[6], and writes that, by the exhibition of this (with the iron
coffin hanging in the air) as a divine miracle, the public were imposed
upon. But this is known by travellers to be false. Yet Pliny relates that
Chinocrates the architect had commenced to roof over the temple of Arsinoe
at Alexandria with magnet-stone[7], that her statue of iron placed therein
might appear to hang in space. His own death, however, intervened, and also
that of Ptolemy, who had ordered it to be made in honour of his sister.
Very little was written by the ancients as to the causes of attraction of
iron; by Lucretius and others there are some short notices; others only
make slight and meagre mention of the attraction of iron: all of these are
censured by Cardan for being so careless and negligent in a matter of such
importance and in so wide a field of philosophizing; and for not supplying
an ampler notion of it and a more perfect philosophy: and yet, beyond
certain received opinions and ideas borrowed from others and ill-founded
conjectures, he has not himself any more than they delivered to posterity
in all his bulky works any contribution to the subject worthy of a
philosopher. Of modern writers some set forth its virtue in medicine only,
as [8]Antonius Musa Brasavolus, Baptista Montanus, Amatus Lusitanus, as
before them Oribasius in his thirteenth chapter _De Facultate
Metallicorum_, Aetius Amidenus, Avicenna, Serapio Mauritanus, Hali Abbas,
Santes de Ardoynis, Petrus Apponensis, Marcellus[9], Arnaldus. Bare mention
is made of certain points relating to the loadstone in very few words by
Marbodeus Callus, Albertus, {3} Matthaeus Silvaticus, Hermolaus Barbarus,
Camillus Leonhardus, Cornelius Agrippa, Fallopius, Johannes Langius,
Cardinal Cusan, Hannibal Rosetius Calaber; by all of whom the subject is
treate