On the Magnet

...only; Theophrastus of Lesbos, Dioscorides, C. Pliny the Second, and Julius Solinus. It was handed down by them only that the magnet attracts iron; all its other virtues remained hidden. But since a bare and overly brief magnetic history existed, certain fabrications and lies were added to this unique and solitary known efficiency, which, in those early times no less than in our own day, were cast out by premature sciolists original: "sciolis" — pretentious, shallow learners. and writers to be devoured by men. For example, that it does not attract iron if the magnet has been rubbed with garlic, or if a diamond is nearby. Stories of this kind are mentioned by Pliny and by Ptolemy in his Quadripartitum. These errors have been constantly propagated and have prevailed (not unlike the way weeds and noxious plants grow) even to our own times, in the writings of many who, so that their volumes might grow to a proper size, write and transcribe many things about many subjects, of which they knew almost nothing certain, with experience as their teacher. Even Georgius Agricola, who himself deserved well of letters, wove fables about the magnet into his books On the Nature of Fossils as if they were true history, having faith in the writings of others. Galen saw its medicinal power in the ninth book On the Faculties of Simple Medicines, and its natural power to attract iron in the first book On Natural Faculties, but he did not recognize the cause, just as Dioscorides before him, nor did he inquire further. But Matthioli, his interpreter, renews the fable of the garlic and the diamond, and also introduces the chapel of Mahomet vaulted with magnets, by which portent (an iron casket hanging in the air) he writes that the common people are imposed upon as if by some divine miracle. But this is known to be false by travelers. Pliny, however, reports that the architect Chinocrates had begun to vault the temple of Arsinoe at Alexandria with magnet stone, so that her image made of iron might appear to hang in the air; but death intervened for both him and Ptolemy, who had ordered it to be done for his sister. Few things were written by the ancients about the causes of the attraction of iron; Lucretius and others mention only lighter things, and others only mention the attraction of iron lightly and thinly. All of these are criticized by Cardan for being so negligent and slothful in such a distinguished matter and so spacious a field of philosophy; he says they neither provided a broader knowledge of it, nor a more cultivated philosophy. Yet he himself, apart from certain received ideas and things transcribed from others and poorly invented, did not commend anything worthy of a philosopher to posterity in his own such great volumes. Some of the moderns show its efficiency only in medicine, such as Antonio Musa Brasavola, Battista Montano, Amatus Lusitanus, and before them Oribasius in his 13th book on the faculty of metals, Aetius of Amida, Avicenna, and Serapio the Younger.