NICOLAUS CAB^US. 349 



Galileo made upon Sagredo's large magnet. His investi- 

 gations at that time went no further, for the following year 

 saw his invention of the astronomical telescope, imme- 

 diately succeeded by the magnificent discoveries in the 

 heavens upon which his fame chiefly rests. When he 

 took up the magnet cursorily in after years it was still to 

 ponder over its attractive power and how this might be 

 augmented, or to devise theories to account for the appar- 

 ent strengthening effect of the armature. He supposed, 

 in the end, that the iron was drawn to the armature with 

 greater force simply because the two surfaces, being smooth 

 and polished, presented more points of contact than could 

 exist between iron and the rough magnet, 1 which was 

 perhaps as good for the time as Gilbert's notion that the 

 touch of the stone awoke a slumbering virtue in the arma- 

 ture, and that then both pulled with their joint forces; 

 and fully as reasonable for example as some hypotheses 

 accounting for the microphonic transmission of speech. 



The huge magnet which was sent to the Grand Duke 

 served its purpose as a toy for that potentate and his suc- 

 cessors for many a day. Ninety years later it became lost, 

 and then Leibnitz, writing to Magliabecchi, 2 deplores the 

 disappearance of a relic which he says the scientific world 

 would have prized beyond the most precious gem, a lament 

 which he might equally well have made over the earlier 

 destruction of Gilbert's terrellas in the great London fire. 



The Italian philosophers were not so swift to appreciate 

 Gilbert's electrics as they were his conception of the earth's 

 magnetism, and it was not until 1629 tnat tne earliest of 

 their researches upon the former were made known. In 

 that year Nicolaus Cabaeus, 3 a Jesuit, then of Ferrara, and 

 a philosopher of remarkable ability, who had maintained 

 a school of philosophy, mathematics and theology in 



1 Galileo: Systema Cosmicum, cit. sup. 



2 Clavorum Germanorum, etc. Florence, 1746, Epistle xxvii. 

 3 Sotuello: Bib. Scripta Soc. Jesu. Rome, 1676; Brucker: Hist. Crit 



Phil. Cabaeus: Philosophia Magnetica, Ferrara, 1629, p. 18. 



