On the magnet, magnetick bodies also, and on the great magnet the earth: a new physiology, demonstrated by many arguments & experiments
History
On the magnet, magnetick bodies also, and on the great magnet the earth: a new physiology, demonstrated by many arguments & experiments
Magnetism -- Early works to 1800
demonstrations by the stone to be made with a globe-shaped magnet as being
more perfect and adapted for the purpose. Take, then, a powerful loadstone,
solid, of a just size, uniform, hard, without flaw[61]; make of it a globe
upon the turning tool used for rounding crystals and some other stones, or
with other tools as the material and firmness of the stone requires, for
sometimes it is difficult to be worked. The stone thus perpared is a true,
homogeneous offspring of the earth and of the same shape with it:
artificially possessed of the orbicular form which nature granted from the
beginning to the common mother earth: and it is a physical corpuscle imbued
with many virtues, by {13} means of which many abstruse and neglected
truths in philosophy buried in piteous darkness may more readily become
known to men. This round stone is called by us a [Greek: mikrogê] or
_Terrella_[62]. To find, then, the poles conformable to the earth's, take
the round stone in hand, and place upon the stone a needle or wire of iron:
the ends of the iron move upon their own centre and suddenly stand still.
Mark the stone with ochre or with chalk where the wire lies and sticks:
move the middle or centre of the wire to another place, and so on to a
third and a fourth, always marking on the stone along the length of the
iron where it remains at rest: those lines show the meridian circles, or
the circles like meridians on the stone, or terrella, all of which meet as
will be manifest at the poles of the stone. By the circles thus continued
the poles are made out, the Boreal as well as the southern, and in the
middle space betwixt these a great circle may be drawn for an æquator, just
as Astronomers describe them in the heavens and on their own globes, or as
Geographers do on the terrestrial globe: for that line so drawn on this our
terrella is of various uses in our demonstrations and experiments
magnetical. Poles are also found in a round stone by a versorium, a piece
of iron touched with a loadstone, and placed upon a needle or point firmly
fixed on a foot so as to turn freely about in the following way:[63]
[Illustration]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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