ANGLO-NORMAN MAGNETIC KNOWLEDGE. 119 



and incapable of either receiving or understanding physi- 

 cal truths. And they were always such vast topics, such 

 ponderous metaphysical disquisitions; and so momentous 

 were the consequences supposed to depend on them that 

 the modern student heartily joins with old Burton in 

 wondering how his scholastic predecessors "could sleep 

 quietly and were not terrified in the night, or walk in 

 the dark, they had such monstrous questions and thought 

 such terrible matters all day long." Where was there any 

 place in the literature of the beginning of such a period 

 for exact physical descriptions of the magnet and its phe- 

 nomena? What was substituted for them appears in the 

 very first writing 1 in the Anglo-Norman language the 

 lingua Romana. This was not a sermon, although the 

 resemblance is frequently strong, but a poem written in 

 1 121 by Phillippe de Thatin, under the high patronage of 

 the Queen of Henry I., Adelaide of Louraine. The work 

 is a Bestiary, founded partly on Pliny's Natural History 

 and partly on the zoological classifications of St. Isidore, 

 interspersed with fables some evidently borrowed from 

 the Orientals. It deals with the subject of magnetism in 

 the following not altogether lucid manner: 



"And this know freely, that they break in pieces the 

 lodestone with goats' blood and lead: it signifies a great 

 matter. By the blood of the goat, we understand corrup- 

 tion in our law. By the lead we understand sin by which 

 men are ensnared. But the lead weighs the iron, which 

 draws sinners to hell. And this virtue it has in it, that it 

 draws iron with it: it signifies that Christians draw Pagans 

 to their law when they leave their heresy and believe." 



Although these were days, as I have said, when any 

 eccentricity in thought or deed might give rise to sus- 

 picions of paltering with the powers of darkness, no 

 charge of sorcery or the compassing thereof could lie 

 against the inspired author of this sort of poesy; but 

 when, in the following paragraph, he proceeds to describe 



1 Wright, T.: Popular Treatises on Science during the Middle Ages, 125. 



