d very negligently, while they merely repeat other people's fictions
and ravings. Matthiolus compares the alluring powers of the loadstone which
pass through iron materials, with the mischief of the torpedo, whose venom
passes through bodies and spreads imperceptibly; Guilielmus Pateanus in his
_Ratio Purgantium Medicamentorum_ discusses the loadstone briefly and
learnedly. Thomas Erastus[10], knowing little of magnetical nature, finds
in the loadstone weak arguments against Paracelsus; Georgius Agricola, like
Encelius[11] and other metallurgists, merely states the facts; Alexander
Aphrodiseus in his _Problemata_ considers the question of the loadstone
inexplicable; Lucretius Carus, the poet of the Epicurean school, considers
that an attraction is brought about in this way: that as from all things
there is an efflux of very minute bodies, so from the iron atoms flow into
the space emptied by the elements of the loadstone, between the iron and
the loadstone, and that as soon as they have begun to stream towards the
loadstone, the iron follows, its corpuscles being entangled. To much the
same effect Johannes Costaeus adduces a passage from Plutarch; Thomas
Aquinas[12], writing briefly on the loadstone in Chapter VII. of his
_Physica_, touches not amiss on its nature, and with his divine and clear
intellect would have published much more, had he been conversant with
magnetick experiments. Plato thinks the virtue divine. But when three or
four hundred years afterwards, the magnetick movement to North and South
was discovered or again recognized by men, many learned men attempted, each
according to the bent of his own mind, either by wonder and praise, or by
some sort of reasonings, to throw light upon a virtue so notable, and so
needful for the use of mankind. Of more modern authors a great number have
striven to show what is the cause of this direction and movement to North
and South, and to understand this great miracle of nature, and to disclose
it to others: but they have lost both their oil and their pains; for, not
being practised in the subjects of nature, and being misled by certain
false physical systems, they adopted as theirs, from books only, without
magnetical experiments, certain inferences based on vain opinions, and many
things that are not, dreaming old wives' tales. Marsilius Ficinus ruminates
over the ancient opinions, and in order to show the reason of the direction
seeks the cause in the heavenly constellat