Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 8 THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM GILBERT AND HIS PREDECESSORS _W. James King_ By W. James King THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM GILBERT AND HIS PREDECESSORS Until several decades ago, the physical sciences were considered to have had their origins in the 17th century--mechanics beginning with men like Galileo Galilei and magnetism with men like the Elizabethan physician and scientist William Gilbert. Historians of science, however, have traced many of the 17th century's concepts of mechanics back into the Middle Ages. Here, Gilbert's explanation of the loadstone and its powers is compared with explanations to be found in the Middle Ages and earlier. From this comparison it appears that Gilbert can best be understood by considering him not so much a herald of the new science as a modifier of the old. THE AUTHOR: W. James King is curator of electricity, Museum of History and Technology, in the Smithsonian Institution's United States National Museum. The year 1600 saw the publication by an English physician, William Gilbert, of a book on the loadstone. Entitled _De magnete_,[1] it has traditionally been credited with laying a foundation for the modern science of electricity and magnetism. The following essay is an attempt to examine the basis for such a tradition by determining what Gilbert's original contributions to these sciences were, and to make explicit the sense in which he may be considered as being dependent upon earlier work. In this manner a more accurate estimate of his position in the history of science may be made. [1] William Gilbert, _De magnete, magneticisque corporibus et de magno magnete tellure; physiologia nova, plurimis & argumentis, & experimentis, demonstrata_, London, 1600, 240 pp., with an introduction by Edward Wright. All references to Gilbert in this article, unless otherwise noted, are to the American translation by P. Fleury Mottelay, 368 pp., published in New York in 1893, and are designated by the letter M. However, the Latin text of the 1600 edition has been quoted wherever I have disagreed with the Mottelay translation.