THE MAGNETIC MOUNTAINS. IOI 



ican monk Vincent de Beauvais 1 repeated the story in 

 1250, he put the mountain squarely on the shores of the 

 Indian Sea, and gave as his authority a Book of Stones 

 written by Galen, who was just as innocent of any such 

 production as Aristotle was. And when John Taisnier, 2 

 arch-plagiarist, in turn told it in 1562, he divided the 

 mountain into several pieces, and put it in the "Aethiopian 

 Sea; n while he changed the Yemen people into Canta- 

 brians, and, regardless of the baldness of the fiction, made 

 them construct their ships of wooden blocks fastened to- 

 gether by glue. 



The evolution of the legend is characteristic of the times. 

 The outcropping magnetite of Phrygia probably attracted 

 the iron tools of the ancient miners, and Nicander trans- 

 ferred its drawing power to the shoes of Magnes. Ptolemy 

 made the rock a mountain, set it on the seashore and 

 caused it to arrest ships; St. Ambrose and Soung So mul- 

 tiply the mountains, the Norsemen and the Arabs distri- 

 bute them widely over the earth and cause them not 

 merely to hold the ships but to pull out the iron nails, 

 and thus we reach the story of the Arabian Nights. 3 



But, to return to Bailak's recital, at the end of which is 

 revealed the probable key to the myth. The Arabs had 

 no iron, or so little of it that vessel fastenings of that 

 material could not be obtained. 4 The great majority of 

 their ships were mere fishing crafts, intended to keep in 



1 Constantinus, in Libro Graduum. 



2 Taisuier : De Nat. Magnet, 1562. 



8 Lane (cit. sup.), says that the Arab author El-Kazweenee (in Ajaib el- 

 Makhlookat) in his account of minerals, places the mine of lodestone on 

 the shore of the Indian Sea, and reports that if the ships which navigate 

 this sea approach the mine or contain anything of iron it flies from them 

 like a bird, and adheres to the mountain ; for which reason it is the 

 general custom to make use of no iron in the construction of vessels em- 

 ployed in this navigation. Note 72. 



4 Agatharcides affirms that iron in ancient Arabia was twice the value 

 of gold. (De Mari Rubro, 60.) 



