although it be buried; by this means anyone will be able easily to dig up concealed treasures." He adds that "it should be very good stone, such as he has not yet seen." Nor indeed will either he or anyone else ever see such a stone or such an experiment. Cardan brings forward an attraction of flesh, wrongly so named and very dissimilar from that of the loadstone; for his _magnes creagus_ or flesh-magnet, from the experiment that it sticks to the lips, must be hooted out from the assembly of loadstones, or by all means from the family of things attractive. Lemnian earth, ruddle, and very many minerals do this, and yet they are fatuously said to attract. He will have it that there is another loadstone, as it were, a third species, into which, if a needle is driven and afterwards stuck into the body, it is not felt. But what has attraction to do with stupefaction, or stupor with a Philosopher's intellect, when he is discoursing about attraction? There are many stones, both found in nature and made by art, which have the power of stupefying. Sulphur flame is said by some to attract, because it consumes certain metals by its power of penetration. So white naphtha attracts flame, because it gives off and exhales an inflammable vapour, on which account it is kindled at some distance, just as the smoke of a recently extinguished candle takes fire again from another flame; for fire creeps to fire through an inflammable medium. Why the sucking fish Echineis or the Remora should stay ships has been variously treated by Philosophers, who are often accustomed to fit this fable (as many others) to their theories, before they find out whether the thing is so in nature. Therefore, in order that they may support and agree with the fatuities of the ancients, they put forward even the most fatuous ratiocinations and ridiculous problems, cliffs that attract, where the {111} sucking fish tarry, and the necessity of some vacuum, I know not what, or how produced. Pliny and Julius Solinus make mention of a stone Chatochitis[190]. They say that it attracts flesh, and keeps hold of the hands, just as a loadstone does iron, and amber chaff. But that happens only from a stickiness and from glue contained in it, since it sticks more easily to the hands when they are warm. Sagda or Sagdo[191], of the colour of a sard, is a precious stone mentioned by Pliny, Solinus, Albertus, and Evax[192]; they describe its nature and relate, on the authority of others, that it specially attracts wood to itself. Some even babble that woods cannot be wrenched away except they are cut off. Some also narrate that a stone is found which grows pertinaciously into ships, in the same way as certain testacea on long voyages. But a stone does not draw because it sticks; and if it drew, it would certainly draw shreds electrically, Encelius saw in the hands of a sailor such a stone of feeble virtue, which would hardly attract even the smallest twigs; and in truth, not of the colour of the sard.