owadays in experiments presents the appearance of
unpolished iron, and is mostly found in iron mines: it is even wont to be
discovered in an unbroken lode by itself: Loadstones of this sort are
brought from East India, China, and Bengal, of the colour of iron, or of a
dark blood or liver colour; and these are the finest, and are sometimes of
great size, as though broken off a great rock, and of considerable weight;
sometimes single stones, as it were, and entire: some of these, though of
only one pound weight, can lift on high four ounces of iron or a half-pound
or even a whole pound. Red ones are found in Arabia, as broad as a tile,
not equal in weight to those brought from China, but strong and good: they
are a little darker in the island of Elba in the Tuscan sea, and together
with {10} these also grow white ones, like some in Spain in the mines of
Caravaca: but these are of lesser power. Black ones also are found, of
lower strength, such as those of the iron mines in Norway and in sea-coast
places near the strait of Denmark. Amongst the blue-black or dusky blue
also some are strong and highly commended. Other loadstones are of a leaden
colour, fissile and not-fissile, capable of being split like slates in
layers. I have also some like gray marble of an ashen colour, and some
speckled like gray marble, and these take the finest polish. In Germany
there are some perforated like honeycombs, lighter than any others, and yet
strong. Those are metallick which smelt into the best iron; others are not
easily smelted, but are burned up. There are loadstones that are very
heavy, as also others very light; some are very powerful in catching up
pieces of iron, while others are weaker and of less capacity, others so
feeble and barren that they with difficulty attract ever so tiny a piece of
iron and cannot repel an opposite magnetick. Others are firm and tough, and
do not readily yield to the artificer. Others are friable. Again, there are
some dense and hard as emery, or loose-textured and soft as pumice; porous
or solid; entire and uniform, or varied and corroded; now like iron for
hardness, yea, sometimes harder than iron to cut or to file; others are as
soft as clay. Not all magnets can be properly called stones; some rather
represent rocks; while others exist rather as metallick lodes; others as
clods and lumps of earth. Thus varied and unlike each other, they are all
endowed, some more, some less, with the peculiar virtue. For