The Magnetic Art

even through the blockage and density of a brass basin or table, it smells and senses the iron from which it earns its life. Take this experiment of it.

Experiment I.

Having fixed a steel needle into a cork float, allow it to float freely upon water held in a basin. Having done this, bring the magnet near from a distance, and you will see the iron immediately sway and insinuate itself toward it, and receive it into its embrace so pertinaciously that it can scarcely be distracted by many separations by tossing it here and there. Nor is the encounter of the magnet to the iron, their mutual love and gathering, any less; for it refuses no touch of them, but always offers itself more gently of its own accord to the encounter of the other. What then this virtue may be, or in what it consists, various people explain variously. Epicurus conjectures the cause to be a certain circulation of atoms flowing from the iron and the magnet; others, like Cardanus with most ancient philosophers Anaxagoras, Thales, Pythagoras Book 7 on Subtleties, ascribe it to the poles of the world or the Cynosura the Little Bear constellation. Others wish it to pull not otherwise than amber pulls straw, and by natural electric effluvia derived from moisture, which cannot be said, since those actions can be impeded by intermediate obstacles, but the action of the magnet cannot. We, leaving behind the opinions of others, say more correctly that it is not atoms, or a thin dust emitted, nor electric traction, which happens only by natural effluvia from moisture, but that the magnet makes these incitations by a formal efficiency, or rather by a radical vigor and primary activity, which Gilbert, book 1 on the magnet, explains thus: "That singular form, not the formal and specific cause of the Peripatetics in mixed bodies, not the propagator of generating bodies, but the form of the primary and principal globes and of their homogeneous, uncorrupted parts, their own entity and