From this brief analysis it will be seen that Gilbert's claims to eminence rest not upon any particular discovery or invention, but upon his having built up a whole experimental magnetic philosophy on a truly scientific basis, in place of the vague and wild speculations which had previously been accepted. By his magnificent generalization from the small scale models to the globe itself, supported from point to point by experimental researches, he created the science of terrestrial magnetism. If from the imperfection of the data at his disposal he fell into sundry errors of detail, he yet founded the method of philosophizing by which those errors were in due time corrected. And if for nothing else than his masterly vindication of scientific method, and his rescue of the subject of magnetism from the pedantry and charlatanry into which in the preceding ages it had lapsed, his memory must be held in high honour. Alas that of the personality of so great a man so little should be known. A brief but characteristic biography of him is enshrined by old Fuller in his _Worthies_. The poet Dryden, and the epigrammatist Owen, celebrated him in still briefer verse. His portrait, which hung for nigh two hundred years in the Schools Gallery, at Oxford, disappeared a century ago, leaving only a poor engraving to perpetuate his scholarly countenance. Doubtless he is one of the four physicians depicted by the pencil of Camden in his famous cartoon (now in the British Museum), as walking in the funeral procession of Queen Elizabeth. Of his handwriting not a vestige was known until about five years ago, when a signature was unearthed in the Record Office. Subsequently four signatures were found in the books of St. John's College; and recently there has come to light a volume of Aristotle bearing Gilbert's own marginal notes. His will lies at Somerset House, but it is only a copy. Of his fine collection of minerals and loadstones, which with his maps, books, manuscripts, and correspondence with Sarpi and Sagredo and others, he bequeathed to the College of Physicians, nothing remains: they perisht in the Great Fire of London. In a quiet corner of the City of Colchester stands the quaint old house where he lived, and where, according to local tradition, he once received the Queen. And hard by it is the church of Holy Trinity, in which a mural tablet records his virtues and marks his last resting place. But his true monument is the immortal treatise in which he laid the foundations of terrestrial magnetism and of the experimental science of electricity. To the names of the men who made great the age of Queen Elizabeth, who added lustre to the England over which she ruled, and made it famous in foreign discovery, in sea-craft, in literature, in poetry, and in drama, must be joined that of the man who equally added lustre in science, Doctor William Gilbert.