588 



Chinese'mariners the use'of the compass. Osorius, in the first 

 book of his ' History of Portugal under Emanuel,' gives a long 

 account of the mai-ine needle which Gama, in his first voyage, 

 found in use at Mosambique (In 1498), in the Arab trading 

 vessels which fi-equented the principal parts of that island. 

 ' These people,' he says, ' aided themselves then in their navi- 

 gation with certain instruments which our pilots call marine 

 needles.' He then goes on describing the Arab compass, 

 which in no very material respect seems to have differed from 

 that now in use. At the end of this minute description, he 

 adds: — ' These Arabs made use then of such needles and marine 

 charts, by the means of which they knew with certainty the 

 situation of maritime places according to the lines dra^vn on 

 such charts. They observed also with quadrants the height of 

 the sun, and the distances of places from the equinoctial line. 

 In brief, they were so well furnished with everything necessary 

 for naAagationthat the pilots of Portugal had hardly anything to 

 teach them in the art of navigating.' Humboldt, in one of the 

 most recent of his publications, informs us that ' More than a 

 thousand years before ovu- era, at the obscurely knowTi epoch of 

 Codrus, and the return of the Heraclides from the Pelopon- 

 nesus, the Chinese already employed magnetic cards, on Avhich 

 the figm-e of a man, whose moveable outstretched arm pointed 

 always to the south, guided them on their way across the vast 

 gi'assy plains of Tartary ; and in the third centiuy of our era, 

 at least seven hundi'ed years before the introduction of the com- 

 pass in the European seas, Chinese vessels navigated the Indian 

 Ocean with needles pointing to the south.'* We read, in a 

 work pubhshed in 1617, of a singular invention, very similar 

 to that of the electric telegraph, described Lq some remarka/- 

 ble Latin verses said to have been recited by the celebrated 

 Cardinal Bembo, at a festival got up in honom- of the retiurn 

 to Rome of an illustrious personage, Hieronymus Alexander, 



'Cosmos, page 169. 



