ATHANASIUS KIRCHER. 365 



far away, or presentiments of great afflictions and great 

 joys or impending peril. " And that was the first attempt, 

 many and many a time since fruitlessly repeated, to ex- 

 plain the psychical things of heaven and earth, through 

 the physical agency of electricity. 



Descartes' Principia appeared in 1644, as I have said, 

 after ten years' seclusion. Meanwhile it had become in- 

 cumbent on somebody of greater ecclesiastical influence 

 than Cabaeus, and of more general eminence as a phil- 

 osopher and theologian, to advance the arguments of the 

 Church against the heresies of Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, 

 and other recusants of that stripe. The task naturally fell 

 to Athanasius Kircher, to whom allusion has already been 

 made ; a Jesuit, a Professor at Rome, and a man of ency- 

 clopaedic knowledge, great gullibility, and the author, 

 says Robert Southwell, 1 of twenty-two works in folio, 

 eleven in quarto, and three in octavo. His treatise on the 

 magnet was written about 1639 and issued in 1641. Many 

 editions of it followed. It adds nothing to the existing 

 knowledge on the subject, but it exhibits an astonishing 

 collection of magnetic apparatus, from perpetual motion 

 to the magnetic toys which are still sold everywhere. It 

 was probably the vade mecum for the practical magneti- 

 cian of the day, if any one pursued that calling. 



Kircher has' the honor of giving to the action of the 

 lodestone its name "Qualitatem Magneticam Mag- 

 netismus appellare placuit." (The magnetic quality may 

 be properly termed magnetism.) And, what is perhaps 

 a little surprising, he also invented the word "Electro- 

 magnetism" heading one of his chapters on the electrics 

 with u HfexTpo-pa-yvtjTio/ibc; that is concerning the magnetism 

 of electrics or the attraction of electrics and their causes.'* 



1 Boyle's works. London, 1744, v. 405. Kircher's genesis of the solan 

 goose is classic. The eggs, he says, are laid in the Arctic regions; they 

 mix with the sea and render it " eggified." Drops of sea water dash on 

 the trees near the shore, and the specific egginess of the sea, the natural 

 vegetation of the tree, and the influence of the sun, unite in hatching the 

 goose. 



