140 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



sary and arduous, the sea when open furnishing a far 

 easier road, while no elaborate buildings or engineering 

 works called for employment of the needle in establishing 

 sites or in determining alignments. On the other hand, 

 adaptation of the guiding needle (assuming it to be known) 

 to marine use would be not at all unlikely. While, there- 

 fore, on the one hand, and for ethnological reasons, it may 

 be possible to assume knowledge of magnetic polarity to 

 have existed among the Finns and Mongols, and that both 

 may have availed themselves of it in migrating, the one 

 people northward and the other eastward; on the other 

 hand and for geographical reasons, the probabilities point 

 more strongly to the Finns, seamen and dwellers by the 

 sea, having discovered the sea use of the magnetic needle 

 rather than the agricultural, inland-Jiving, sea-dreading 

 Chinese. 



Bringing together now the conclusions which have been 

 thus far suggested, we have found first, that the circum- 

 stances attending the appearance of the compass among the 

 European sailors all indicate a radiation, so to speak, of 

 intelligence concerning it from some central point or focus : 

 second, that at about this time the city of Wisbuy, on the 

 Island of Gottland, in the Baltic sea, was the great gather- 

 ing-place and mart for all sea-faring men, and that thither 

 came Goths, Swedes, Russians, Danes, Angles, Scots, 

 Flemings, Vandals, Saxons, Spaniards and Finns: and 

 third, that a knowledge of magnetic polarity may be 

 more reasonably conjectured to have existed among the 

 Finns rather than among any of the other peoples named, 

 because of the race affiliation of the Finns and their pecu- 

 liar skill in sea-sorcery. It may readily be imagined that if 

 they possessed in the needle or stone a charm which would 

 guide a ship from haven to haven, even in the narrow 

 seas, how mysterious such a talisman would seem to the 

 ever superstitious mariner, and how eagerly he would seek 

 to obtain it and how quickly the tidings of it would spread 

 throughout all the fleets of the western world. Nor is 



