On the Magnet

Hali Abbas, Santes de Ardoniis, Petrus Apponensis, Marcellus, and Arnaldus. Marbodeus Gallus, Albertus, Matheus Sylvaticus, Hermolaus Barbarus, Camillus Leonhardus, Cornelius Agrippa, Fallopius, Johannes Langius, Cardinal Cusanus, and Hannibal Rosetius Calaber mention certain things about the magnet in very few words, all of which is treated most negligently, while they merely recite the fabrications and delusions of others. Matthioli compares the attracting forces of the magnet, which pass through iron tools, to the mischief of the torpedo-fish original: "torpedinis" — electric ray., whose poison passes through bodies and creeps secretly. Guilielmus Puteanus, in his treatise on purgative medicines, discusses the magnet briefly and learnedly. Thomas Erastus, not knowing the magnetic nature at all, uses weak reasons concerning the magnet against Paracelsus. Georgius Agricola, like Encelius and other metallurgists, shows only its uses. Alexander of Aphrodisias, in his Problems, believes the question concerning the magnet to be inexplicable. Lucretius Carus, a poet of the Epicurean sect, thinks that attraction occurs because, just as minute bodies flow from all things, so atoms flow from the iron into the space between the iron and the magnet, which has been emptied by the seeds of the magnet; once they begin to flow toward the magnet, the iron follows because of the entangled particles. Johannes Costaeus has something similar from Plutarch. Thomas Aquinas, in the 7th book of his Physics, writing a few things about the magnet, touches upon its nature not badly, and would have published much more with his divine and sharp intellect if he had been versed in magnetic experiments. Plato thinks it a divine virtue. But after the magnetic motion toward the North and South was discovered in the previous age, three or four hundred years ago, or recognized again by men, many learned men have tried to illustrate such an excellent and necessary virtue for human use, each according to his own intellect, either with admiration and praise or with certain small arguments. Many of the moderns have labored to show the cause of this direction and motion toward the North and South, and to understand it as a miracle of nature, and to open it to others: but they lost their oil and labor original: "oleum & operam perdiderunt" — a classical idiom for wasting time and effort., because they were not experienced in the subjects of nature and were deceived only by books and certain false physical principles. Without magnetic experiments, they assumed certain arguments conceived from vain opinion and dreamt in an old-womanish way of many things that were not. Marsilio Ficino ruminates on the opinions of the ancients, and to show the reason for the direction, he seeks the cause in the star-constellation of the Bear, asserting that the virtue of the Bear prevails in the stone and is transferred into the iron. Paracelsus asserted that there are stars that, endowed with the power of the magnet, attract iron to themselves. Levinus Lemnius describes and praises the compass original: "pyxidem" — literally 'box', referring to the mariner's compass.,