190 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



But just what sort of compass the Chinese then had, even 

 so strong an advocate in their behalf as Klaproth fails to 

 discover. He quotes from a work of the i6th century a 

 description of the floating compass in common use before 

 the time of Peregrinus, and goes to Dr. Barrow for the 

 details of their pivoted needle compass; so that, while we 

 may infer that, with characteristic conservatism, they may 

 have passed down these instruments unaltered from some 

 far distant period, there is still that fatal absence of direct 

 proof which renders all early Chinese invention open to 

 more or less suspicion. That the deviation of the needle 

 from the astronomical meridian or, in other words, its 

 variation was well known to the Chinese long before that 

 phenomenon had been remarked in Europe is sufficiently 

 well established; and therefore I shall not devote space to 

 the long discussions based on the assumption of its 

 European invention which fill the treatises. A spurious 

 addition to a Leyden codex of Peregrinus' letter, in which 

 the variation is mentioned, has led many writers to credit 

 Peregrinus with its discovery. But he knew nothing of 

 it, and if, as Bertelli concludes, the variation in Europe 

 was in fact zero at his time, there was nothing to direct 

 his attention to it. The first practical knowledge among 

 European people of the fact that the needle is not strictly 

 true to the earth's geographic pole belongs to a later period 

 than that now under review. 



During the following century little was added to the 

 magnetic discoveries of Peregrinus, nor was the compass 

 as he and Gioja left it materially improved. The mention 

 of the magnet and of the needle became more frequent, 

 philosophers, poets, and theologians dealing with the sub- 

 ject with the same catholicity as in the past, and finding 

 in it an unfailing source of supply for simile and meta- 

 phor. 



Raymond Lully, 1 metaphysician and monk, entangles 



*De Contemplatione. Capmany : Memories Historias Sobre la Mar- 

 ina. Madrid, 1792, I, 73. 



