On the Magnet

DE MAGNETE, BOOK I.

CHAPTER II.

What kind of stone the magnet is, and about its discovery.

An ornate woodcut initial 'L' features foliage and floral motifs. That stone which is commonly called the magnet—whether from its discoverer (though not that fabulous cowherd of Pliny from Nicander, whose shoe-nails and staff-tip stuck to the magnetic field while he was grazing his herds) or from the region of Magnesia in Macedonia, fertile in magnets; or is named from the city of Magnesia in Asia Minor in Ionia, next to the river Maeander. Hence Lucretius says,

Which the Greeks call the magnet by its native name
Because it originates in the native mountains of the Magnetes.

It is called Heracleus from the city of Heraclea, or from that unconquered Hercules, because of its great strength and power and dominion over iron, the tamer of all things: or sideritis star-stone/iron-stone as if it were an iron-worker's stone; it was not unknown to the most ancient writers, both the Greeks, Hippocrates, and others; as well as (I believe) the Jews and Egyptians. Because in the most ancient iron mines, famous in Asia, the magnet, the brother of the same womb, was often dug up with iron. And if those things which are reported about the people of China are true, they were not ignorant in magnetic experiments in the earliest times, even because the magnets among them are the most excellent of all. The Egyptians, as Manetho relates, designate it by the name of the bone of Horus: calling that power which presides over the turning of the sun, Horus, just as the Greeks call it Apollo. But afterward, as reported by Euripides,