354 TH E INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



the earth is a great magnet, while stoutly averring that it 

 is endowed with magnetic properties. 



Thus far had the Italians advanced. They had undeni- 

 ably made progress beyond Gilbert in the "new physi- 

 ology," had stumbled upon electrical repulsion, and had 

 attacked the Englishman, with more or less success, 

 whenever they caught him wandering from the safe ground 

 of sure experiments. But what had become of the great 

 cosmical theory the magnetic inter-relation of the 

 heavenly bodies the extension of the sphere of virtue into 

 the heavens, and the government of the planets by the 

 mutual reactions of their "effused" spheres which Gil- 

 bert regarded as at once the flower and crown of all his 

 labors? For that doctrine there was as little resting-place 

 in the bosom of the Church, as in the inhospitable breast 

 of Bacon. There was no lodgment for it, except among 

 the Copernicans, and so it fell into the outspread arms of 

 one of them and there gently expired. John Kepler, 

 casting about for clews, clutching at guess after guess in 

 pursuit of proof of his great laws trying to figure some- 

 thing like universal gravitation out of his inner conscious- 

 ness came upon this outcast theory, and administered 

 upon its effects. 



In his treatise on the movements of Mars, 1 we are told 

 that the sun is a great rotary magnet carrying its Gil- 

 bert's rather sphere of virtue around with it. The 

 planets are in that vast whirlpool and are carried with it. 

 If it be asked why should not this great solar magnet 

 draw its satellites to destruction in its fiery mass? Be- 

 cause, is the reply, the field of force is made up of fibers 

 filaments that are straight, that is, which surround the 

 sun, so that the planets are dragged along in these mag- 

 net streams, like boats in a maelstrom. 



"Sed proh Deum immortalem!" a few years later, 

 shouts Athanasius Kircher, that irascible but omniscient 

 philosopher of the Church Militant, losing his temper 



1 De Motibus Stellis Martis. Prague, 1609. 



