CHAPTER XI. 



AFTER the death of the Queen, Gilbert was continued 

 in his office of Court Physician by James I. He survived 

 his royal mistress, however, by but seven months, his 

 decease occurring in November, 1603. The year was a 

 plague year, and London suffered with even more than 

 usual severity ; but whether Gilbert succumbed to that 

 terrible disease or to some other malady is not known. 

 His books, papers and collections, which he had be- 

 queathed to the Royal College of Physicians, were all 

 destroyed in the Great Fire. He was buried in Trinity 

 Church, Colchester, where a tablet to his memory, bearing 

 an epitaph far beneath his deserts and couched in doubtful 

 Latin, still remains. 



That Gilbert intended the De Magnete to be his final 

 and greatest work, or that he designed submitting his dis- 

 coveries and his assumptions to the judgment of the world 

 only through its pages, is, I am persuaded, far from the 

 truth. The concluding book of his treatise is at best but 

 an outline of % his cosmical theories; and, as the establish- 

 ment of these was his chief aim, it is hardly supposable 

 that he would have contented himself with so brief a state- 

 ment of conclusions after so many years of experiment and 

 study. The volume was edited and supervised while in 

 press by Edward Wright, who at the time was a lecturer on 

 Navigation for the East India Company, 1 and who takes 

 occasion in the prefatory address to praise Gilberts sup- 

 posed discoveries concerning dip, compass variation and 

 the finding of a ship's position at sea ; so that it seems 

 possible that Wright, because of his belief in the import- 



1 Ridley: Magneticall Animadversions, London, 1617. 



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