96 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



commentators supplemented their transcriptions from 

 Pliny with the absurd notions which finally clustered 

 thick around the lodestone and the amber. In fact, it was 

 only after some intellectual force had been gathered in the 

 general awakening, that men acquired sufficient ingenuity 

 to propose myths which, although absolutely un trammeled 

 by the least regard for the truth, seemed at all capable of 

 deepening a mystery which, by the universal consent of 

 past generations, had already reached the limit of profund- 

 ity. To these delusions I shall refer hereafter. I have now 

 to note the rise and spread of one which, in the end, ad- 

 vanced science instead of impeding it ; for it immensely 

 magnified the powers of the magnet without attempting to 

 ascribe to them any new or different quality. It rested on 

 a natural, if not a reasonable inference, and this perhaps 

 accounts both for its early conception and long persistence; 

 in fact there are few fables which have had so great vital- 

 ity or have been so widely believed as that of the Magnetic 

 Mountains. 



In that marvelous collection of romances, the Arabian 

 Nights Entertainments, is the tale of the third royal men- 

 dicant, 1 who ventured to sea. After a long period of calm, 

 the captain of the ship tells him, in great perturbation, that 

 u to-morrow we shall arrive at a mountain of black stone 

 called lodestone ; the current is now bearing us violently 

 towards it, and the ships will fall in pieces and every nail in 

 them will fly to the mountain and adhere to it ; for God 

 hath given to the lodestone a secret property, by virtue of 

 which everything of iron is attracted towards it. On that 

 mountain is such a quantity of iron as no one knoweth 

 but God, whose name be exalted ; for, from times of old, 

 great numbers of ships have been destroyed by the in- 

 fluence of that mountain." On the following morning, 

 as the ship approached the fatal stone, "the current car- 



1 In some editions called Agib, the third calendar. 



