THE COMPASS CARD. 191 



the purely physical facts of magnetic attraction with his 

 occult teachings, and does this at so early a date (1297) 

 that books have been written to advocate his right to the 

 credit for Peregrinus' achievements. Dante in the Para- 

 diso 1 speaks of 



' ' a voice 



That made me seem like needle to the star 

 In turning to its whereabouts," 



which, if recording no discovery, at least led to the first 

 mention of the pivoted compass card itself carrying the 

 needle; which is the form now used, wherever recourse is 

 not had to the still older notion of the floating magnet. 

 Da Buti, 2 the commentator on the great Florentine, writ- 

 ing in 1380, tells us that "the navigators have a compass 

 in the middle of which is pivoted a wheel of light paper 

 which turns on its pivot, and that on this wheel the needle 

 is fixed and the star (Rose of the Winds) painted." 



In the north, Barbour, writing in 1375, says that in 1306, 

 King Robert, of Scotland, in crossing from Arran to Car- 

 rick, steered by a fire on the shore; for he u na nedill had 

 na stone;" and the adoption of the Mediterranean compass 

 seems to have been long delayed, for not until 1391 does 

 Chaucer 3 mention the substitution of the horizon circle 

 divided into thirty-two points in place of twenty-four. 



NOTE. The text which I have followed in the foregoing epitome of 

 Peregrinus' researches is the one which Bertelli Barnabita has prepared 

 from a careful collation of all of the existing manuscripts of the letter. 

 (Sopra Pietro Peregrine di Maricourt e la sua Epistola de Magnete. 

 P. D. Timoteo Bertelli Barnabita, Mem. Prima. Rome, 1868. Sulla 

 Epistola di Pietro Peregrino de Maricourt e Sopra Alcuni Trovati, etc. 

 Mem. Seconda : Bull, di Bib. e di Storia delle Scienze. Math, e Fisiche. 

 Vol. I., Jan., Mar. and April, 1868.) 



The first printed edition edited by Gasser (Petri Peregrini Maricurtensis 

 de Magnete, seu rota perpetui motus libellus. * * Per Achillem P. 



1 Canto XII., v. 28. 



2 Da Buti, Francesco: Comment. Sopra la Div. Commedia. Pisa, 1862. 



3 Treatise on the Astrolabe. Ed. Skeat. Early Eng. Hist. Soc. Lon- 

 don, 1872. 



