554 COSMOS. 



zius of Beauvais gives in his " Mirror of Nature" to the two 

 ends of the magnetic needle, indicate, Hke 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 Ptole 

 mais, 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 ear- 

 lier use of the compass in European seas than at the beginning 

 of the fourteenth century, is furnished by a nautical treatise of 

 Raymond LuUy of Majorca, the singularly ingenious and ec- 

 centric man whose doctrines excited the enthusiasm of Gior- 

 dano Bruno when a boy,* and who was at once a philosoph- 

 ical systematizer and an analytic chemist, a skillful mariner and 

 a successful propagator of Christianity. In his book entitled 

 Fenix de las Maravillas del Orbe, and published in 1286, 

 Lully remarks, that the seamen of his time employed " instru- 

 ments of measurement, sea charts, and the magnetic needle. "1 



which Klaproth erroneously endeavors to derive the Spanish sur and 

 the Portuguese stil, which, without doubt, like the German siid, are true 

 German words, does not properly refer to the particular designation 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 inves- 

 tigations in his Lettre a M. A. de Humboldt, sur V Invention de la Bous' 

 sole, 1834, p. 41, 45, 50, 66, 79, and 90; and the treatise of Azuni of 

 Nice, which appeared in 1805, under the name of Dissertation sur VOr- 

 igine de la Boussole, p. 35, and £5-68. Navarrete, in his Discurso 

 Historico sohre los Progresos del Arte de Nave gar en Espana, 1802, p. 

 28, recalls a remarkable passage in the Spanish Leyes de las 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 inter- 

 mediary agent (medianera) between the loadstone {la piedra) and the 



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



Rey Don Alonso el IX. (according to the usually adopted chronolog- 

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



* Jordano Bruno, par Christian Bartholomes, s. 1847, t. ii., p. 181- 

 187. 



t " Tenian los mareantes instrumento, carta, compas y aguja." — Sal 



