THE AMBER PHENOMENON. 301 



years earlier it would have been easy to attribute every- 

 thing troublesome to the influence of the stars or any other 

 4 'occult" control, and, in fact even then, books on "the 

 miracles of nature" jostled the commentaries on Aristotle 

 on the shelves of every philosopher. But nothing could 

 have been more repugnant to Gilbert than such a course. 

 The amber effect, he saw, must be accounted for, and 

 now, by an hypothesis which would be consistent with, 

 though different from, the broad theory which, at all haz- 

 ards, was to be maintained. Such was the path which 

 now opened before Gilbert. 



Far back in mediaeval times there arose that curious 

 divagation of the human mind, based, perhaps, in some 

 degree, on the ascendency of the Aristotelian philosophy 

 of words, of seeking to explain things not understood by 

 giving to them new names. I/ater, this was carried to 

 extremes by Paracelsus, and the same course has since 

 been followed by charlatans generally. It was also in 

 Gilbert's day the custom of the alchemists, and, to some 

 extent, that of all scientific students, to hide discoveries 

 and modes of operation in arbitrary words and phrases, 

 often the merest gibberish, of which only the users knew 

 the meaning. Thus there came into existence a pedantic 

 terminology. 



"A Babylonish dialect which learned pedants most affect," 



which invaded every department of knowledge and which, 

 in some branches of science, though much modified and 

 more logically conceived, still flourishes. 



Gilbert, from his own professional experience, was well 

 aware of the dangers which word-manufacture involved on 

 the one hand, and the temptations which it offered on the 

 other ; for, no matter how sure his experiments and well- 

 demonstrated his arguments, the necessary learning of a 

 new vocabulary would be almost an insurmountable bar- 

 rier to the very minds to which his appeal lay from the 

 schoolmen and philosophants. But when he unearths 



