n, without error, without injury from
ills and diseases, so present with us, has an implanted activity, vigorous
through the whole material mass, fixed, constant, directive, executive,
governing, consentient; by which the generation and death of all things are
carried on upon the surface. For, without that motion, by which the daily
revolution is performed, all earthly things around us would ever remain
savage and neglected, and more than deserted and absolutely idle. But those
motions in the sources of nature are not caused by thinking, by petty
syllogisms, and theories, as human actions, which are wavering, imperfect,
and undecided; but along with them reason, instruction, knowledge,
discrimination have their origin, from which definite and determined
actions arise, from the very foundations that have been laid and the very
beginnings of the universe; which we, on account of the infirmity of our
minds, cannot comprehend. Wherefore Thales, not without cause (as Aristotle
relates in his book _De Anima_), held that the loadstone was animate, being
a part and a choice offspring of its animate mother the earth.

* * * * *

{211} [Illustration]

BOOK SIXTH.

_CHAP. I._

ON THE GLOBE OF THE EARTH, THE
_great magnet_.

Hitherto our subject hath been the loadstone and things magnetical: how
they conspire together, and are acted upon, how they conform themselves to
the terrella and to the earth. Now must we consider separately the globe
itself of the earth. Those experiments which have been proved by means of
the terrella, how magnetick things conform themselves to the terrella, are
all or at least the principal and most important of them, displayed by
means of the earth's Body: And to the earth things magnetical are in all
respects associate. First, as in the terrella the aequator, meridians,
parallels, axis, poles are natural boundaries, as numerous experiments make
plain: So also in the earth these boundaries are natural, not mathematical
only (as all before us used to suppose). These boundaries the same
experiments display and establish in both cases alike, in the earth no less
than in the terrella. Just as on the periphery of a terrella a loadstone or
a magnetick piece of iron is directed to its proper pole: so on the earth's
surface are there turnings-about, peculiar, manifest, and constant on
either side of the aequator. Iron is indued with verticity by being
extended toward a pole