290 HISTORY OF DISCOVERY RELATITE TO MAGNETISM. 



for iron. It is true that King Solomon is said to have been acquainted with 

 the u.'jc of the mariner's compass, and the Ilebrew Parvaim, to which he sent 

 his vi'ssels for treasures, is said to have been no other country than Peru itself; 

 but, since Solomon employed Phenician seamen, the compass would necessarily 

 ifave been known to the Phenicians, and from these the Greeks and the Romans 

 would most certainly have learnt its application. 



The claims of the Chinese to the discovery of the directive power of the 

 magnet, and its application to navigation, has long been affirmed and denied ; 

 but it has of late been defended by an author of much learning and ability, 

 namely, Ivlaproth, in a letter to Humboldt. It is difficult to mention any useful 

 contrivance which is not in some degree known to this singular people, or any 

 period in histoiy when they did not know it. The great obstacle which has 

 stood in the way of admitting the claims of the Chinese to many of these in- 

 ventions is the high antiquity to which their records profess to ascend, and their 

 consequent incompatibility with our own received chronology; but whoever has 

 looked with any degre6 of attention upon the fragments of their scientific his- 

 tory, and the incidental mention made of things which were familiar to the 

 writers, but which did not form the principal object of the record, cannot fail to 

 be struck with the apparent general consistency which runs through all their 

 claims to high antiquity, and to be forced to the conclusion that there is still 

 wanting a key to that consistency which is not furnished by the sweeping 

 charge of the forgery of their. annals. 



It has been said that the fine arts of China appear more like being in a con- 

 dition of gradual decay than in a state of freshness and energy, and that it may 

 be possible that their arts, as well as those of Egypt, were transferred from some 

 older people, who were in a condition of decline ; but this is mere conjecture, 

 unsupported by any evidence, either written or oral. In regard to the Chinese, 

 it would appear, from the little progress they have made since they became 

 known to history, and their want of knowledge and appreciation of the scien- 

 tific principles on which art is founded, that their condition is just such as 

 would be produced in an ingenious people in a long time by the accidental dis- 

 coveries of facts, and their empirical application to the wants and conveniences of 

 life. After a certain time, such a people would make no further progress ; the 

 facts which could be gathered from casual observation would be exhausted, and 

 the advance in civilization, as well as the increase in population, would become 

 exceedingly tardy. 



Duhalde, in his account of China, states that the inhabitants of that country 

 were acquainted with the polarity of the needle in the earliest times ; that hun- 

 dreds of years before our era they used, in their land excursions, an instrument 

 in which the movable arm of a human figure invariably pointed towards the 

 south, as a means of assistance in finding their way through the grass-covered 

 plains of Tartary. Even as early as the third century of our era, about sevea 

 hundred years b(;fore the introduction of the mariner's compass into the Euro- 

 pean seas, it is asserted that Chinese vessels sailed on the Indian ocean, directed 

 by magnetic polarity pointing towards the south. Humboldt has shown that, 

 according to the "Fdu-Tsaou," (a work on medicine and natural history, 

 written four hundred years before the time of Columbus,) the Chinese suspended 

 the magnetic needle by a fibre of silk, and found that it did not point directly 

 towards the south, but deviated somewhat towards the southeast. 



The directing property of the magnetic needle, and its use in navigation, 

 became known in Europe at a considerably later period. It is mentioned, for 

 the first time, by Are Erode, an Icelandic historian, who was born in 1068, ac- 

 cording to the testimony of Snorro Sturleson, and who must have written his 

 History of the Discovery of Iceland towards the end of the eleventh century. 

 In this work he states, in the most unequivocal manner, that, in his time, the 

 directing property of the magnetic stone was known. He also states that in 



