h its uterine brother, iron. And if the
tales be true which are told of the people of the Chinas, they were not
unacquainted in primitive times with magnetical experiments, for even
amongst {9} them the finest magnets of all are still found. The Egyptians,
as Manetho relates, gave it the name Os Ori: calling the power which
governs the turning of the sun Orus, as the Greeks call it Apollo. But
later by Euripides, as narrated by Plato, it was designated under the name
of Magnet. By Plato in the _Io_, Nicander of Colophon, Theophrastus,
Dioscorides, Pliny, Solinus, Ptolemy, Galen, and other investigators of
nature it was recognized and commended; such, however, is the variety of
magnets and their points of unlikeness in hardness, softness, heaviness,
lightness, density, firmness, and friability of substance: so great and
manifold are the differences in colour and other qualities, that they have
not handed down any adequate account of it, which therefore was laid aside
or left imperfect by reason of the unfavourable character of the time; for
in those times varieties of specimens and foreign products never before
seen were not brought from such distant regions by traders and mariners as
they have been lately, and now that all over the globe all kinds of
merchandise, stones, woods, spices, herbs, metals, and ore in abundance are
greedily sought after: neither was metallurgy so generally cultivated in a
former age. There is a difference in vigour; as whether it is male or
female: for it was thus that the ancients used often to distinguish many
individuals of the same species. Pliny quotes from Sotacus five kinds;
those from Aethiopia, Macedonia, Boeotia, the Troad, and Asia, which were
especially known to the ancients: but we have posited as many kinds of
loadstones as there are in the whole of nature regions of different kinds
of soil. For in all climates, in every province, on every soil, the
loadstone is either found, or else lies unknown on account of its rather
deep site and inaccesible position; or by reason of its weaker and less
obvious strength it is not recognized by us while we see and handle it. To
the ancients the differences were those of colour[49], how they are red and
black in Magnesia and Macedonia, in Boeotia red rather than black, in the
Troad black, without strength: While in Magnesia in Asia they are white,
not attracting iron, and resemble pumice-stone. A strong loadstone of the
kind celebrated so often n