Inaugural Physico-Medical Dissertation on the Magnetism of the Macrocosm and Microcosm

into which it may fit, it immediately exercises its elastic force, and moves with impetus from the full into the vacuum.

§. 16. Here, however, it must be noted that the tuous spirituous matter of the distended bubbles is not received just anywhere, but only in empty bubbles that are justly congruent. Nor are the empty bubbles capable of being filled by just any spirit, but only by a symbolic or congruent one. Therefore, to apply these statements to our present business, it must be concluded in no other way than the following: in iron and the magnet, such congruence is found, so that the spirit which exists more copiously in the magnet, and promptly slips out from the distended bubbles, is easily received into the iron. From this it happens that the magnet is drawn to the iron itself, or the iron to the magnet. For iron, filled in its empty bubbles with the received magnetic tuous matter, sends that same matter back again to the evacuated pores of the magnet; and there is between the subjects of the magnet and the iron a certain circulation of ether, a pulling of each toward the other.

§. 17. We therefore elicit three things from the presupposed deduction of magnetic action. The first is the immediate and proximate agent principle, namely the spirit consymbolic on both sides; (2) the instrument or medium, the ether; and finally, the cause without which it would not be, or the necessary condition, conformity and sympathy of both. Indeed, these are not only to be observed in special Magnetism, but also to be attended to in Magnetism in general, which it will not be difficult to prove with other examples. We bring forward as a medium the cure of certain poisoned wounds by means of the snake stone, which the Portuguese call Piedra della Cobra Snake Stone, which P. Athanasius Kircher, S.J. also mentions in his booklet on the triple magnet in the nature of things (Section II, Chapter V, in his China Illustrated, page 83; see also P. Michael Boym in his Chinese Flora). The aforementioned stone does not move and adhere except in poisoned wounds, for there the poison, as in a living body, having been rendered tuous, obtains an impulsive or elastic effort in the extended bubbles, which it exercises against...