bi - o” 
248 Invention of the Mariner's: Compass. ; 
steered to the south by means giihe magnet. But the Chinese 
were acquainted with the declination of the needle, also, a long 
while before it was supposed to be first discovered by Columbus. 
In a medical natural history, composed between the years 1111 and 
1117, the author gives the following notice of the magnet and of 
its properties. This is the most ancient description of the mag- 
net found as yet in any Chinese book: ‘The magnet is covered 
over with little bristles slightly red, and its superficies is rough. 
It attracts iron, and unites itself with it; and for this reason it is 
commonly called ‘the stone which licks up iron.’ When an 
iron point is rabbed upon the magnet, it acquires the property of 
pointing to the south; yet it always declines eastward, and is not 
perfectly true to the south. On this account, a thread of new 
cotton is taken ‘and attached by a particle of wax as large asa 
mustard-seed, exactly to the middle of the iron, which is thus 
suspended in some place where there is no wind. The needle 
then points, without variation, to the south. If the needle is 
passed. through a little tube of thin reed, which is afterwards 
placed on water, it directs to the south, but always with a decli- 
nation to the point ping, that is to say, east 8 south.” The accu- 
racy of this observation, referring it to the capital city of the 
empire, is confirmed by P. Amiot, who, after taking magnetic 
observations at Peking for several years, found the. variation of 
the needle there to be constantly from 2° to 2° 30’. 
Upon a due consideration of all these historic data, in connec- 
tion with the comparison of the European and Oriental names of 
the magnet, the magnetic needle, and the compass, it cannot ap- 
pear to any one to be arash conclusion, that the knowledge of 
the natural production, as well as of its wonderful applicability 
in navigation, existed first in China, and was communicated by ° 
the intervention of the Arabs to the nations of Europe, probably 
on occasion of the more frequent intercourse between Europe an 
the East to which the Crusades gave rise. * 
But before the Chinese had applied the magnet to use in navi- 
gation, it was employed among them in the construction of mag- 
netic cars by which travellers on land directed their course. Not 
to cite those stories of the Chinese relative to these cars which 
lose themselves in a fabulous antiquity, the earliest historic allu- 
sion to them dates in the first half of the second century, when 
the Emperor Tcheou Koung, as it is related, gave to some em 
bassadors from Tonkin and Cochin-China “five travelling ¢4"% 
