=A.D. 1646.=--Browne (Sir Thomas), an eminent English physician and writer, publishes the well-known treatise “Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors,” which ran through six editions in twenty-seven years, and upon which his fame is principally established. With regard to the possibility of such a magnetic telegraph as Strada speaks of he says (Book II. chap. iii.): “The conceit is excellent and, if the effect would follow, somewhat divine; whereby we might communicate like spirits, and confer on earth with Menippus in the moon. And this is pretended from the sympathy of two needles, touched with the same loadstone, and placed in the centre of two abecedary circles or rings, with letters described round about them, one friend keeping one and another keeping the other, and agreeing upon the hour when they will communicate, at what distance of place soever, when one needle shall be removed unto another letter, the other, by wonderful sympathy, will move unto the same.” As the result of experiment, he found that “though the needles were separated but half a span, when one was moved the other would stand like the pillars of Hercules, and if the earth stand still, have surely no motion at all.... By electrical bodies,” he says, “I understand not such as are metallical, mentioned by Pliny and the ancients; for their _electrum_ was a mixture made of gold, with the addition of a fifth part of silver; a substance now as unknown as true _aurichalcum_, or _Corinthian_ brass, and set down among things lost by Pancirollus. Nor by electric bodies do I imagine such only as take up shavings, straws and light bodies, amongst which the ancients placed only _jet_ and _amber_, but such as, conveniently placed unto their objects, attract all bodies palpable whatsoever. I say conveniently placed, that is, in regard of the object, that it be not too ponderous or any way affixed; in regard of the agent, that it be not foul or sullied, but wiped, rubbed and excitated; in regard of both, that they be conveniently distant, and no impediment interposed. I say, all bodies palpable, thereby excluding fire, which indeed it will not attract, nor yet draw through it, for fire consumes its effluxions by which it should attract.” The different chapters of this second book treat of the loadstone, of bodies magnetical and electrical, of magnetical rocks and attractive mountains, and also make allusion to the cross on the church of St. John in Ariminium, to the reported magnetical suspension of Mahomet’s tomb, etc. etc.