The word _Magnet_ comes from the country of _Magnesia_, where "loadstone" (magnetic iron ore) seems first to have been found. The artificial magnet, as made and used in early experiments and still common as a toy or as a piece in some electrical appliances, is a piece of fine steel, of hard temper, which has been magnetized, usually by having had a current passed through or around it, and sometimes by contact with another magnet. For the singular property of a magnet is that it may continually impart its quality, yet never lose any of its own. Steel alone, of all the metals, has the decided quality of retaining its property of being a magnet. A "bar" magnet is a straight piece of steel magnetized. A "horseshoe" magnet is a bar magnet bent into the form of the letter "U." Every magnet has two "poles"--the positive, or North pole, and the negative, or South pole. If any magnet, of any size, and having as one piece two poles only, be cut into two, or a hundred pieces, each separate piece will be like the original magnet and have its two poles. The law is arbitrary and invariable under all circumstances, and is a law of nature, as unexplainable and as invariable as any in that mysterious code. All bar magnets, when suspended by their centers, turn their ends to the North and South, a familiar example of this being the ordinary compass. But in magnetism, _like repels like_. The world is a huge magnet. The pole of the magnet which points to the North is not the North pole of the needle as we regard it, but the opposite, the South. No one can explain precisely why iron, the purer and softer the better, becomes a powerful and effective magnet under the influence of the current, and instantly loses that character when the current ceases, and why steel, the purer and harder the better, at first rejects the influence, and comes slowly under it, but afterwards retains it permanently. Iron and steel are the magnetic metals, but there is a considerable list of metals not magnetic that are better than they as _conductors_ of the electric current. In a certain sense they are also the electric metals. A Dynamo, or Motor, made of brass or copper entirely would be impossible. All the phenomena of combined magnetism and electricity, all that goes to make up the field of industrial electric action, would be impossible without the indispensable of ordinary iron, and for the sole reason that it possesses the peculiar qualities, the affinities, described. * * * * *