ST. AUGUSTINE ON THE MAGNET. 87 



ies of our era. The machine which releases its contents 

 or gives some information on the insertion of a coin, and 

 which only in recent years has invaded our public places, 

 stood at the doors of the Egyptian temples, and automati- 

 cally doled out its little measure of consecrated water in 

 return for five drachmas dropped into the slot in its recep- 

 tacle. 1 But there was nothing surprising or mysterious 

 about either mechanisms or portrait painting. On the 

 other hand, the magnet and the amber, both seemingly 

 lifeless, yet animated, formed, as it were, the connecting 

 link between the dead earth and living objects. Short 

 of things divine no greater mystery than this could be 

 conceived. It became an ever-present and always-ques- 

 tioning Sphinx rearing itself above the desert of ignor- 

 ance and superstition, in which, for generation after 

 generation, men were doomed to strive and struggle. 



Through the early centuries of the Christian Era, we 

 shall find this problem dealt with again and again some- 

 times purely physically, more often metaphorically; some- 

 times by the poets, and with greater frequency by the his- 

 torians and fathers of the church. 



"When I first saw it," says St. Augustine, 2 speaking 

 of the attraction of the magnet, "I was thunderstruck 

 ( u ve hem enter inhorrui"\ for I saw an iron ring attracted 

 and suspended by the stone ; and then, as if it had com- 

 municated its own property to the iron it attracted, and 

 had made it a substance like itself, this ring was put near 

 another and lifted it up, and as the first ring clung to the 

 magnet, so did the second ring to the first. A third and 

 fourth were similarly added, so that there hung from the 

 stone a kind of chain of rings with their hoops connected, 

 not interlinking, but attached together by their outer sur- 

 face. Who would not be amazed at this virtue of the 

 stone, subsisting, as it does, not only in itself, but trans- 



1 Heronis Alexandrium : Spiritalium Liber, Urbini, 1575, s. 29, xxi. 

 *De Civitate Dei, lib. 21, c. 4. (Dod's Translation.) Edinburgh, 1871. 



