THE SAMOTHRACIAN RINGS. 25 



the charlatan sells to the credulous so-called "magnetic" 

 panaceas for every ailment, so the priests of Samothrace 

 drove a thriving trade in their magnetized iron rings as 

 amulets and cure-alls. They were worn by the worship- 

 pers of the Cabiri, later by the Roman priests of Jupiter, 

 and in Pliny's time they became the usual pledge of 

 betrothal. 



The Cabiri were remembered long after their individual 

 cult had disappeared. They became converted into the 

 gnomes and the elves of the legends and folk-tales of the 

 Middle Ages, and in the first modern treatises on mining 

 we find them still depicted as dwarfs with their picks and 

 shovels and attended by their dogs, searching for the 

 metals in the depths of the earth. Even so skillful a 

 miner as George Agricola, 1 whose great work begins the 

 present science of metallurgy, cannot divest himself of a 

 half-belief in them; for in his quaint pictures he always 

 shows them at work in the mines, although often amid 

 machinery which the old Greeks who worshiped at Samo- 

 thrace might well have regarded as the handiwork of 

 higher gods than those which they there adored. 



There were many near-by sources for the lodestone 

 which supported and magnetized the Samothracian rings; 

 for iron mines existed not only on the slopes of Mount 

 Ida, and on Elba and Crete, but on the island of Samo- 

 thrace itself. It was because the magnetic ore was found 

 in the same, deposits as the ordinary ores of iron, that the 

 Greeks at first called it "Siderites" or ironstone. Later 

 because of its power of overcoming iron, and of forcing 

 that hard and intractable metal to come to it, they termed 

 it the "Hercules stone," and later still they gave it the 

 name which it still most commonly bears, the magnet, 

 which as Lucretius says comes "from its country, for it 

 had its origin in the native hills of the Magnesians." 

 This, of course, is widely at variance with Pliny's fanciful 

 derivation of the same name. 



Agricola : De Re Metallica, 1556. 



