vapour, on which
account it is kindled at some distance, just as the smoke of a recently
extinguished candle takes fire again from another flame; for fire creeps to
fire through an inflammable medium. Why the sucking fish Echineis or the
Remora should stay ships has been variously treated by Philosophers, who
are often accustomed to fit this fable (as many others) to their theories,
before they find out whether the thing is so in nature. Therefore, in order
that they may support and agree with the fatuities of the ancients, they
put forward even the most fatuous ratiocinations and ridiculous problems,
cliffs that attract, where the {111} sucking fish tarry, and the necessity
of some vacuum, I know not what, or how produced. Pliny and Julius Solinus
make mention of a stone Chatochitis[190]. They say that it attracts flesh,
and keeps hold of the hands, just as a loadstone does iron, and amber
chaff. But that happens only from a stickiness and from glue contained in
it, since it sticks more easily to the hands when they are warm. Sagda or
Sagdo[191], of the colour of a sard, is a precious stone mentioned by
Pliny, Solinus, Albertus, and Evax[192]; they describe its nature and
relate, on the authority of others, that it specially attracts wood to
itself. Some even babble that woods cannot be wrenched away except they are
cut off. Some also narrate that a stone is found which grows pertinaciously
into ships, in the same way as certain testacea on long voyages. But a
stone does not draw because it sticks; and if it drew, it would certainly
draw shreds electrically, Encelius saw in the hands of a sailor such a
stone of feeble virtue, which would hardly attract even the smallest twigs;
and in truth, not of the colour of the sard. So Diamond, Carbuncle,
Crystal, and others do attract. I pass over other fabulous stones;
Pantarbe, about which Philostratus writes that it draws other stones to
itself; Amphitane also, which attracts gold. Pliny in his origin of glass
will have it that a loadstone is an attractor of glass, as well as of iron.
For in his method of preparing glass, when he has indicated its nature, he
subjoins this about loadstone. "Soon (such is the astute and resourceful
craft) it was not content to have mixed natron; loadstone also began to be
added, since it was thought to attract to itself the liquor of glass (as it
does iron)." Georgius Agricola writes that to the material of glass (sand
and natron) one part also of