PETER PEREGRINUS. 167 



of his brother Louis IX., of France, Peter or Peregrinus 

 as for the sake of uniformity with the old writers we shall 

 hereafter term him very probably went to the Orient 

 in Charles' train. Friar Bacon indicates plainly enough 

 what his functions were. He was skilled in arms and 

 magic, and as pretty much all mechanical and physical 

 knowledge, in those days, over and above what Archi- 

 medes had taught, was included broadly under the last- 

 named term, Peregrinus was, in brief, an engineer. He 

 probably devised engines for throwing stones and fire-balls, 

 or for breaching walls ; while his knowledge of geodesy 

 came into play in building fortifications and digging mines. 

 During this employment, Peregrinus seems to have con- 

 ceived the idea of converting the sphere of Archimedes 

 into a self-moving magnetic motor, and then to have gone 

 a step further and evolved a magnetic perpetual motion on 

 an entirely different principle. It is a most singular fact 

 that he reached these delusions through a series of bril- 

 liant discoveries, in which he not only overthrew most of 

 the old notions concerning magnetism, but established, 

 for the first time, the great fundamental laws of the sci- 

 ence. Yet he cannot well be condemned for thus landing 

 in an impossibility. No one knew that such a thing as a 

 self-moving machine was impossible. The force of such a 

 conception/ especially when attained through the medium 

 of experimentation which was correct in itself, and upon 

 an intellect educated perhaps to as high a degree as was 

 attainable in those days to the appreciation of the magni- 

 tude of it, may well have been overwhelming. A machine 

 'moved by the virtue which God had put into the lodestone 

 and requiring no human aid such was the initial idea 

 which, running on to other conclusions, must have de- 

 veloped itself into speculation concerning the stupendous 

 results which many such machines could accomplish, the 

 possible accumulation of their powers, and the vast aggre- 

 gated mights and that was an age when might made 

 right which should be at the disposal of whoever con- 



