204 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



Ill 1546, Jerome Fracastorio 1 questioned the existence 

 of the polar mountains, and says that Bishop Oviedo, hav- 

 ing made diligent inquiry "about that part of Sannatia 

 now called Moscovia," could find no such elevations. 

 Olaus Magnus, 2 who lived in the North, however, not 

 only affirms the existence of the mountains, but directly 

 avers that the "compass follows them in direction." He 

 also finds an island near the Arctic circle where the 

 needle becomes demagnetized. 



If the magnetic mountains of the North governed the 

 needle, the variation was still to be accounted for. That, 

 however, presented little difficulty. The mountains, it 

 was explained, were not at the north pole, but at a dis- 

 tance from it. "The needle does not point to the true 

 North," remarks Francesco Maurolycus 3 in 1567, "but by 

 nature to a certain island which Olaus Magnus calls the 

 magnetic island." Martin CortezMiad evolved this and 

 more twenty years before, for he had not only to account 

 for variation, but for secular variation the needle, in his 

 time, not pointing to the rocks, as located in the 1508 

 edition of Ptolemy. But mountains which had already 

 traveled from Cochin China were abundantly movable, so 

 Cortez merely shifted them sufficiently to the south to 

 meet the changed conditions a course evidently approved 

 by Livio Sanuto, who did the same thing years afterward. 



Meanwhile the world began to speculate as to what sort 

 of a place this magnetic pole el calamitico might be, 

 and what would happen to those who went there. Thus 

 the sailors, urged by love of adventure and curiosity, be- 

 gan those journeys to the far north of which the end is 

 not yet, and thus the quest of the north pole has its rise 

 in the desire to attain the great island of lodestone to 



1 De Sympathia ; Opera, Venice, 1555, 103. 



2 Hist, de Gent. Sept. Rome, 1555, lib., ii., c. xxxvi. 



3 Op. Mathematica. Venice, 1575. 



4 Breve Compendia- de la Sphera: The Arts of Navigation, trans, by R. 

 Eden. London, 1561. 



