268 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



it may be presumed that Gilbert imbibed the ideas which 

 made him not only the first of English Copernicans, but 

 from his very nature an active defender of the new theory, 

 with the original tenets of which he coupled his belief 

 that the diurnal rotation, as well as the polarity, of the 

 earth is due to the magnetic nature or Form of a so-called 

 terrene matter of which he regarded the globe as com- 

 posed. 



, The ultimate aim and object of Gilbert's work was 

 therefore to substantiate the doctrine of Copernicus by 

 entirely new arguments and experiments : and this at a 

 time when the opinion of the world or what was then 

 nearly the same, the opinion of the Church was inflexibly 

 arrayed against it. To have published such a theory in 

 the England of Mary would have inevitably resulted in 

 the consignment of the book, if not its author, to the 

 flames; but the Roman arm did not extend to Elizabeth's 

 England, and the Queen's physician might safely brave 

 the power which, in his boyish days, for the utterance of 

 heresies far less pestilent and subversive, he had seen hale 

 his townsmen and neighbors to the stake. So he printed 

 what he had excogitated, not in barbarous monk-L,atin, 

 bristling with contractions and packed into a dumpy 

 octavo, after the fashion of most scientific works of the 

 time, but in language which, if not entirely Augustan and 

 betraying its English origin in its sturdy assertiveness and 

 bluff invective, is far from destitute of rhetorical grace; 

 and replaced the incubus imprimatur of the Holy Inquisi- 

 tion with pictures of the Queen's Arms, and her monogram 

 and her falcon badge of maidenhood, inherited from the 

 ill-fated Anna Boleyn, and her rising phoenix semper 

 eadem which, a dozen years before, had soared to glory 

 over the wreck of the Invincible Armada. It may have 

 been chance which transferred to Gilbert's pages the same 

 emblazonments which appear in those of Darcie's History 

 of England of earlier date, which ends with the story of 

 the magnificent victory in the Channel; it may have been 



