And first, _Dioscorides_ puts a shrewd quality upon it, and such as men are apt enough to experiment, who therewith discovers the incontinency of a wife, by placing the Loadstone under her pillow, whereupon she will not be able to remain in bed with her husband. The same he also makes a help unto thievery. For Thieves saith he, having a design upon a house, do make a fire at the four corners thereof, and cast therein the fragments of Loadstone: whence ariseth a fume that so disturbeth the inhabitants, that they forsake the house and leave it to the spoil of the Robbers. This relation, how ridiculous soever, hath _Albertus_ taken up above a thousand years after, and _Marbodeus_ the Frenchman hath continued the same in Latine Verse, which with the Notes of _Pictorius_ is currant unto our dayes. As strange must be the Lithomancy or divination from this Stone, whereby as _Tzetzes_ delivers, _Helenus_ the Prophet foretold the destruction of _Troy_: and the Magick thereof not safely to be believed, which was delivered by _Orpheus_, that sprinkled with water it will upon a question emit a voice not much unlike an Infant. But surely the Loadstone of _Laurentius Guascus_ the Physitian, is never to be matched; wherewith, as _Cardan_ delivereth, whatsoever Needles or Bodies were touched, the wounds and punctures made thereby, were never felt at all. And yet as strange is that which is delivered by some, that a Loadstone preserved in the salt of a _Remora_, acquires a power to attract gold out of the deepest Wells. Certainly a studied absurdity, not casually cast out, but plotted for perpetuity: for the strangeness of the effect ever to be admired, and the difficulty of the trial never to be convicted.