5° 



ESSEX WORTHIES. 



III. —WILLIAM GILBERT. OF COLCHESTER, FOUNDER OF 

 THE SCIENCE OF ELECTRICITY. 



By SILVANUS P. THOMPSON, D.Sc, B.A., F.R.A.S., &c. 



(Principal and Professor of Physics, City and Guilds Technical College, Finsburj.) 



[A Lecture delivered at the Meeting at Colchester, Ju y Sth, iSgo.\ 



A MONG the worthies whose names have made famous the 

 " spacious times of great EHzabeth," none in this nineteenth 

 century deserves greater honour than Dr. WilHam Gilbert, President 

 of the Royal College of Physicians, and Physician in Ordinary to 

 Her Majesty the Queen. ^ His name, though less familiar to the 

 general public, is known to every electrician as that of the man who 

 not only rescued from empiricism and mysticism the subject of the 

 magnet, but who also founded the theory of the compass by his 

 demonstration of the magnetism of the globe. In an age when the 

 fantastic philosophies of the schoolmen still prevailed he calmly 

 worked out the inductive method of reasoning from the known to 

 the unknown, trying his arguments by the touchstone of experiment. 

 Nor is even this his greatest glory. What Shakespeare is to the 

 drama — what Raleigh is to geography — what Drake is to naval 

 warfare — what Bacon is to philosophy — that, and more than that, is 

 Gilbert to the science of electricity. There were dramatists before 

 Shakespeare, geographers before Raleigh, naval heroes before Drake, 

 and philosophers before Bacon, but there were no electricians before 

 Gilbert. He stands forth not merely as the brilliant exponent of the 

 science of electricity, he is its absolute founder. His great work, 

 "De Magnete," published in 1600, after many years of patient, 

 laborious, and costly research, drew the attention of all the learned 

 men of Europe, and won for him an undying fame. 



" I extremely admire and envy the author of De MagKe/e," wrote 

 Galileo, the famous astronomer. " I think him worthy of the 

 greatest praise for the many new and true observations which he has 

 made." 



" Gilbert shall live till loadstones cease to draw, 

 Or British fleets the boundless ocean awe." 



sang Dryden in his Epistle to Dr. Charlton. 



1 A considerable amount of information respecting Dr. Clilberd was given in the report of the 

 meeting at Colchester, in the Essex Naturalist, vol. iv. pp. 174-185. — Ed. 



