THE GARLIC MYTH. 143 



Baptista Porta J expressly ridicules the delusion prevailing 

 even in his time which caused mariners, when in charge 

 of the lodestone, to avoid eating onions or garlic, which 

 not only may "deprive the stone of its virtue, but, by 

 weakening it, prevent them from perceiving -their correct 

 course." So potent was this garlic myth that it was re- 

 peated steadily for fifteen hundred years. "I cannot 

 think," observes one philosopher of the lyth century, 2 

 "that the ancient sages would write so confidently of that 

 which they had no experience of, being a thing so obvious 

 and easy to try: therefore I suppose they had a stronger 

 kind of Garlick than with us." It began with Pliny, and 

 came down by way of Solinus, Ptolemy, Plutarch, Al- 

 bertus Magnus, Matthiolus, Ruetis, Langius, Marbodaeus, 

 and the Arabian physicians and philosophers. True, 

 Pietro of Abano first contradicted it before 1316 and 

 Cardan 3 followed in 1550; nevertheless, the vitality of the 

 notion* not only survived these attacks, but attained such 

 vigor that when Philip Melanchthon, the great theologian 

 of the Reformation, undertook to write a book on Phy- 

 sics, 5 in 1575, this same delusion is the only phenomenon 

 concerning the magnet which he mentions; and he in- 

 troduces it as an illustration of an accidental effect. It 

 got its quietus in 1646 at the hands of that genial and 

 witty iconoclast, Sir Thomas Browne, 6 who says "for an 

 iron wire heated red hot and quenched in the juice of the 



1 Magia Naturalia, 1589, Lib. vii., c. 48. 



2 Ross : Arcana, 192. 3 De Subtilitate, lib. vii., 474. 



* Numerous theories have been evolved to explain the origin of this 

 fiction. The most ingenious is that noted by Bertelli in his Memoirs of 

 Peregrinus (Mem. ii., p. 39). He says that the passage in Pliny's Nat. 

 History, " Ferrum ad se trahente magnete lapide et alio (theamede) 

 rtirsus abigente a sese," is given in some codices so that "alio" reads 

 " allio," thus transforming "other" into "garlic." This hypothesis re- 

 lieves Pliny of responsibility for the error, and places it upon some un- 

 known transcriber. 



5 Initia Doctrinse Physicse. Wittenberg, 1575, 221. 



6 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ii., iii. 



