52 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



bodies outwardly projected from the attracting body com- 

 bining with and bringing back the body attracted. That 

 seems to have convinced the Greeks and Romans then, 

 and the rest of the world for the ensuing two thousand 

 years, that the amber and the magnet were interrelated ; 

 or, at all events, that they both attracted for exactly the 

 same reason, and therefore nothing was to be gained by 

 looking into the subject further. As for the Egyptians, it 

 is doubtful whether they ever brought amber into exten- 

 sive use at all, before quite a late period of their history. 

 Only a few amber beads have been found in their tombs, 

 and these last were of the 2d and 3d centuries of our era. 1 



The great Greek physician, Asclepiades, 2 recommends 

 pills of amber as a specific for hemorrhages, and that 

 seems to be the first medical use of the resin. His equally 

 eminent brother of Rome 3 has scant mention of it in his 

 great work on materia medica. 



All that the civilized world had learned concerning the 

 lodestone and the amber has now been in substance stated. 

 It is briefly summed up in the knowledge of the attractive 

 capacity in each, of the ability of the magnet apparently to 

 transfer its powers to iron, and of the existence of (sup- 

 posedly) a kind of lodestone by which iron is repelled. 



1 " An amber necklace, about 22 inches long, was also found in a grave 

 here one-third of it the small beads only were kept at Bulak, as amber 

 was almost, or quite, unknown in Egypt before." Tanis. 2d Memoir. 

 Egypt. Explorat. Fund. W. F. Petrie. London, 1889. Per contra 

 Clemens (Clem. Alex. Paedagog. iii. c. 2,) speaks of the sanctuary in 

 Egyptian temples as shining "with gold, silver and amber." Possibly 

 the word "amber " here is a mistranslation of the similar term for the 

 electrum alloy. See Wilkinson : Anc. Egypt, i. 246, Boston, 1883. 



' l Lib., vii., de Coinp. Med. Time, circa 200 A. D. 



'Lib. de Simp. Med. See for this and preceding reference, Aldro- 

 vandus, Musaeum Metallicum, Bologna, 1648, p. 415. 



