Gioja’s claim, had an heraldic figure of the mariner’s compass emblazoned on their banners. It seems a thousand pities to throw doubt upon so picturesque a tradition, for the date of the invention of the compass has been fixed as 1302, two years only after the holding of the famous Papal Jubilee in Rome which Dante’s verse has described for us. Nor can the ingenious theory be upheld that the fleur-de-lys, the emblem of the French kings of Naples, which still decorates the dial of the compass in almost all lands, is in any wise connected with Carlo il Zoppo, the monarch to whom Gioja is said to have dedicated his ingenious discovery. No, we have little doubt that the compass, like so many of the scientific wonders that crept into Europe before and during the time of the Renaissance, was originally brought from the far East, a farther East than the argosies of Amalfi had ever penetrated. The little magic box with its moving needle was first used, it is now admitted, by the cunning merchants of Cathay during their trading expeditions across the stony monotonous plains of Central Asia that lay between the Flowery Land and the civilization of Persia. From Cathay the use of the magnetic needle was introduced to the Arab mathematicians of Baghdad and Cairo, and through them the secret of the lodestone of China was conveyed to the coast towns of the Levant. At Aleppo or Alexandria some astute trader of Amalfi—perhaps his name really was Flavio Gioja—contrived to learn the new method of steering from some Moslem or Jewish merchant, and he in his turn brought this novel and precious piece of information back to the Italian shores. If, then, a native of Amalfi did not evolve the idea of the compass out of his own brain, at least it was the old Republic which first impressed the Western world with its immense value, and this, too, at a far earlier period than the date usually assigned to Gioja’s “discovery.” For a Christian bishop of Jerusalem a hundred years before Gioja’s day makes mention of the compass as being in common use amongst the Saracens of Palestine, whilst its existence was certainly known to Brunetto Latini, the tutor of Dante, whom for certain moral failings upon earth his brilliant pupil somewhat harshly places in the infernal regions. History has, in short, long deprived poor disconsolate Positano of its vaunted glory in the production of a medieval scientist whose very existence has now become a matter of speculation.