not attracted into its former bed; but when once it is unsettled and at a distance, it is * solicited by the opposite pole. But if the small piece F E is placed back again in its bed or brought close to, without any substances intervening, it acquires its former combination, and, as a part of the whole once more united, accords with the whole and sticks readily in its former position; and E remains toward A, and F toward B, and they settle steadily in their mother's lap. The reasoning is the same when the stone is divided into equal parts through the poles. [Illustration] A spherical stone is divided into two equal parts along the axis A B; * whether therefore the surface A B is in the one part facing upward (as in the former diagram) or lying on its face in both parts (as in * the latter), the end A tends toward B. But it must also be understood that the point A is not carried with a definite aim always toward the point B, because in consequence of the division the verticity proceeds to other points, as to F G, as appears in the fourteenth chapter of this book. And L M are now the axes in each, and A B is no longer the axis; for magnetick bodies, as soon as they are divided, become single magnetick wholes; and they have {123} vertices in accordance with their mass, new poles arising at each end in consequence of the division. Yet the axis and the poles always follow the leading of a meridian; because that force passes along the meridians of the stone from the æquator to the poles, by an everlasting rule, the inborn virtue of the substance agreeing thereto from the long and lasting position and the facing of a suitable substance toward the poles of the earth; by whose strength continued through many centuries it has been fashioned; toward fixed and determined parts of which it has remained since its origin firmly and constantly turned. * * * * * CHAP. III. How Iron acquires Verticity through a Loadstone, and how that verticity _is lost and changed_.