Friction between an oblong piece of iron and a loadstone imparts to the former magnetick virtues, which are not corporeal nor inherent and persistent in any body, as we showed in the discussion on coition. It is plain that the iron, when it has been rubbed hard with one end and applied to the stone for a pretty long time, receives no stony nature, acquires no weight; for if, before the iron is touched by the stone, you weigh * it in a small and very exact goldsmith's balance, you will see after the rubbing that it has exactly the same weight, neither diminished nor increased. But if you wipe the iron with cloths after it has been touched, or wash it in water, or scour it with sand or on a grindstone, still it in nowise lays aside its acquired strength. For the force is spread through the whole body and conceived in the inmost parts, and cannot in any way be washed or wiped away. Let an experiment then be made in fire, that untamed tyrant of nature. Take a piece of iron of the length of a palm and the thickness of a goosequill pen; let this iron be passed through a suitable round cork and placed on the surface of water, and observe the end which turns to the north; rub this particular end with the true southern end of a loadstone; the iron so rubbed turns toward the south. Remove the cork, and place the end * which was excited in the fire until the iron is just red-hot; when it is cooled, it will retain the strength of the loadstone and the verticity, though it will not be so prompt, whether because the force of the fire had not yet continued long enough to overcome all its {124} strength, or because the whole iron was not heated to redness, for the virtue is diffused through the whole. Remove the cork a second time, and putting the whole iron in the fire, blow the fire with the bellows, so that it may be all aglow, and let it remain a little longer time red-hot; when cooled (so, however, that, whilst it is cooling, it does not rest in one position), place it again on the water with the cork, and you will see that it has lost the verticity * which it had acquired from the stone. From these experiments it is clear how difficult it is for the property of polarity implanted by the loadstone to be destroyed. But if a small loadstone had remained as long in the same fire, it would have lost its strength. Iron, because it does not so easily perish, and is not so easily burnt up as very many loadstones, retains its strength more stably, and when it is lost can recover it again from a loadstone; but a loadstone when burnt does not revive. But now that iron, which has * been deprived of its magnetick form, moves in a different way from any other piece of iron, for it has lost its polar nature; and whereas before the touch of the loadstone it may have had a motion toward the north, and after contact toward the south; now it turns to no definite and particular point; but afterwards, very slowly and after