340 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



to Challoner, and that what Barlowe had not purloined 

 from Gilbert he had filched from him. But Barlowe is 

 still eager for the fray. 



"Except this Ridley had ploughed with my Heifer hee 

 had not known my Riddle," he rejoins / after assert- 

 ing that Ridley had surreptitiously obtained a manuscript 

 copy of his book, and identifying with careful precision 

 much of his stolen property in Ridley's pages. And then, 

 after sating himself with verbal scarification of Ridley, he 

 essays to meet the acrimonious demand of the latter that 

 he should state unequivocally the precise inventions he 

 claims to have made, and specifies improvements in hang- 

 ing the dipping needle, the magnetical difference between 

 iron and steel, "the right way of touching magneticall 

 needles," the piecing and cementing of lodestones, and that 

 a "Loadstone being double capped must take up so great 

 weight;" which we may pass by mainly because those 

 which are of importance are not Barlowe's, and those 

 which are probably his are not important. 



The best thing Barlowe did was to draw a clear line be- 

 tween Gilbert's magnetic discoveries and Gilbert's cosmical 

 theories, by distinctly affirming the first and as distinctly 

 disaffirming the second "Entreating of the motion of the 

 earth," he says, "I think there is no man living further 

 from beleeving itt than myself," thus setting himself right 

 with the Anti-Copernicans; and then reconciling his appar- 

 ent simultaneous belief and disbelief in Gilbert by quoting 

 "Amicus Socrates, Amicus Plato, sed magis arnica veritas" 

 and "Nullius addictus jurare in verba Magistri." Ridley 

 drew no such line because he was himself Copernican It 

 will be remembered that Bacon also separated Gilbert's 

 discoveries and hypotheses, and that it is only after per- 

 ceiving that fact that his diverse criticisms can be mutually 

 reconciled; but unlike Barlowe he left the dividing bound- 

 ary hazy and obscure. 



Marlowe: A Briefe Discovery of the Idle Animadversions of Marke 

 Ridley. London, 1618. 



