can
recognize the vertex[86]. In all of them a Boreal end draws an Austral and
repels a Boreal, and contrariwise, according to the laws magnetical. Yet
herein wrought iron differs from the loadstone and from its own ore,
inasmuch as in an iron ball of any size, such as those used for artillery
or cannon, or bullets used for carbines or fowling-pieces, verticity is
harder to acquire and is less apparent than in a piece of loadstone, or of
ore itself, or than in a round loadstone. But in long and extended pieces
of iron a power is at once discerned; the causes of which fact, and the
methods by which it acquires its verticity and its poles without use of a
loadstone, as well as the reasons for all the other obscure features of
verticity, we shall set forth in describing the motion of direction.

* * * * *

{32} CHAP. XIIII.

Concerning other powers of loadstone, and its
_medicinal properties_.

Dioscorides prescribes loadstone to be given with sweetened water, three
scruples' weight, to expel gross humours. Galen writes that a like quantity
of bloodstone avails. Others relate that loadstone perturbs the mind and
makes folk melancholick, and mostly kills. Gartias ab Horto[87] thinks it
not deleterious or injurious to health. The natives of East India tell us,
he says, that loadstone taken in small doses preserves youth. On which
account the aged king, Zeilam, is said to have ordered the pans in which
his victuals were cooked to be made of loadstone. The person (says he) to
whom this order was given told me so himself. There are many varieties of
loadstone produced by differences in the mingling of earths, metals, and
juices; hence they are altogether unlike in their virtues and effects, due
to propinquities of places and of agnate bodies, and arising from the pits
themselves as it were from the matrices being soul. One loadstone is
therefore able to purge the stomach, and another to check purging, to cause
by its fumes a serious shock to the mind, to produce a gnawing at the
vitals, or to bring on a grave relapse; in case of which ills they exhibit
gold and emerald, using an abominable imposture for lucre. Pure loadstone
may, indeed, be not only harmless, but even able to correct an over-fluid
and putrescent state of the bowels and bring them back to a better
temperament; of this sort usually are the oriental magnets from China, and
the denser ones from Bengal, which are neither misliking