g a short discourse of the magnes or lodestone, and
amongest other his vertues, of a newe discovered secret and
subtill propertie, concernyng the declinyng of the needle,
touched therewith under the plaine of the horizon. Now first
founde out by Robert Norman Hydrographer_. London, 1581. The
possibility is present that Norman's work was a direct
stimulus to Gilbert, for Wright's introduction to _De
magnete_ stated that Gilbert started his study of magnetism
the year following the publication of Norman's book.

[8] Hellman, _ibid._, William Borough, _A discourse of the
variation of the compasse, or magneticall needle. Wherein
is mathematically shewed, the manner of the observation,
effects, and application thereof, made by W. B. And is to
be annexed to the newe attractive of R. N._ London, 1596.

[9] Hellman, _ibid._, Simon Stevin, _De havenvinding_,
Leyden, 1599. It is interesting to note that Wright
translated Stevin's work into English.

Instead of new experimental information, Gilbert's major contribution
to natural philosophy was that revealed in the title of his book--a
new philosophy of nature, or physiology, as he called it, after the
early Greeks. Gilbert's attempt to organize the mass of empirical
information and speculation that came from scholars and artisans, from
chart and instrument makers, made him "the father of the magnetic
Philosophy."[10]

[10] As Edward Wright was to call him in his introduction.

Gilbert's _De magnete_ was not the first attempt to determine the
nature of the loadstone and to explain how it could influence other
loadstones or iron. It is typical of Greek philosophy that one of the
first references we have to the loadstone is not to its properties but
to the problem of how to explain these properties. Aristotle[11]
preserved the solution of the first of the Ionian physiologists:
"Thales too ... seems to suppose that the soul is in a sense the cause
of movement, since he says that a stone has a soul because it causes
movement to iron." Plato turned to a similar animistic explanation in
his dialogue, _Ion_.[12] Such an animistic solution pervaded many of
the later explanations.

[11] Aristotle, _On the soul_, translated by W. S. Hett, Loeb
Classical Library, London, 1935, 405a20 (see also 411a8:
"Some think that the soul pervades the whole universe, whence
perhaps came Thales' view that everythin