As a physician, Gilbert valued iron for its medicinal properties, but denounced quacks and wandering mountebanks who practised "the vilest imposture for lucre's sake," using powdered lodestone for the cure of wounds and disorders. "Headaches," he said, "are no more cured by application of a lodestone than by putting on an iron helmet or a steel hat"; and again: "To give it in a draught to dropsical persons is either an error of the ancients or an impudent tale of their copyists." Elsewhere he condemns prescriptions of lodestone as "an evil and deadly advice" and as "an abominable imposture." In the sixth and last book of _De Magnete_, Gilbert sets forth his views on such astronomical subjects as the figure of the earth, its suspension in space, rotation on its axis and revolution around the sun. As to the figure of our planet, the primitive view widely credited in early times was that the earth is a flat, uneven mass floating in a boundless ocean. The Hindoos, however, did not accept the flatland doctrine, but taught that the earth was a convex mass which rested on the back of a triad of elephants having for their support the carapace of a gigantic tortoise. Of course, they did not say how the complaisant chelonian contrived to maintain his wonderful state of equilibrium under the superincumbent mass. Aristotle (384-322, B. C.) taught that the earth, fixed in the center of the universe, is not flat as a disk, but round as an orange, giving as proofs (1) the gradual disappearance of a ship standing out to sea and (2) the form of the shadow cast by the earth in lunar eclipses, to which others added (3) the change in the altitude of circumpolar stars readily noticeable in traveling north or south. Aristarchus of Samos (310-250), one of the great astronomers of antiquity, went further, not fearing to teach that the earth is spherical in form, that it turns on its axis daily and revolves annually around the sun. Such orthodox teaching did not, however, commend itself to people generally, as they did not exactly like the idea of being whisked round with their houses and cities at a dangerous speed, preferring to explain celestial phenomena by the rotation of the vast celestial sphere, with all the starry host, round a flat, immovable earth. For them such a system of cosmography recommended itself by its simplicity and reasonableness as well as by the sense of stability, rest and comfort which it brought along with it. Ptolemy, who flourished at Alexandria about 150 A. D. and whose name is associated with a system of the world, also held that the earth is spherical in form, giving at the same time some very ingenious proofs of his belief. St. Augustine, in the fourth century, was not opposed to the doctrine of a round earth, though he felt the religious difficulty arising from the existence of the antipodes, which difficulty reached its acute stage four hundred years later.