OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 



629 



Vincenzius of Beauvais gives in his " Mirror of Nature" to 

 the two ends of the magnetic needle, indicate, like many Arabic 

 names of stars which we still employ, the channel, and the 

 people from whom western countries received the elements 

 of their knowledge. In Christian Europe the first mention 

 of the use of the magnetic needle occurs in the politico- 

 satirical poem, called La Bible, by Guyot of Provence, in 

 1190, and in the description of Palestine by Jacobus of Vitry, 

 Bishop of Ptolemais, between 1204 and 1215. Dante (in his 

 Parad., xii. 29) refers, in a simile, to the needle (ago\ 

 " which points to the star." 



The discovery of the mariner's compass was long ascribed 

 to Flavio Gioja of Positano, not far from the lovely town of 

 Amalfi, which was rendered so celebrated by its widely ex- 

 tended maritime laws ; and he may, perhaps, have made some 

 improvement in its construction (1302). Evidence of the 

 earlier use of the compass in European seas, than at the begin- 

 ning of the fourteenth century, is furnished by a nautical trea- 

 tise of Raymond Lully of Majorca, the singularly ingenious 

 and eccentric man whose doctrines excited the enthusiasm of 

 Giordano Bruno when a boy,* and who was at once a philo- 

 sophical systematiser and an analytic chemist, a skilful 



from which Klaproth erroneously endeavours to derive the Spanish sur t 

 and the Portuguese sul, which, without doubt, like the German sild, 

 are true German words, does not properly refer to the particular desig- 

 nation of the quarter indicated; it signifies only the time of high noon ; 

 south is dschenub. On the early knowledge possessed by the Chinese, 

 of the south pointing of the magnetic needle, see Klaproth's important 

 investigations in his Lettre a M. A. de Huniboldt, sur ^invention de 

 la Bvussole, 1834, pp. 41, 45, 50, 66, 79, and 90; and the treatise of 

 Azuni of Nice, which appeared, in 1805, under the name of Disserta- 

 tion sur Forigine de la Boussole, pp. 35, and 65-68. Navarrete, in his 

 Discurso historico sobre los progresos delArtede Navegar enEspaTia, 

 1802, p. 28, recals a remarkable passage in the Spanish Leyes de la* 

 Partidas (II. tit. ix. ley 28), of the middle of the thirteenth century: 

 " The needle, which guides the seaman in the dark night, and shows 

 him, both in good and in bad weather, how to direct his course, is the 

 intermediary agent (medianera) between the loadstone (la piedra) and 



the north star " See the passage in Las siete Partidas del 



sabio Rer Don Alonso el IX. (according to the usually adopted chro- 

 nological order Alonso the Xth.), Madrid, 1829, t. i. p. 473. 



* Jordano Bruno, par Christian Bartholomfes, s. 1847, t ii. pu 

 Ul-ltt 



