Invention of the Mariner^ s Compass. 243 



Surselva, {magnet,) the Hungarian, (magnet-ko,) the Russian, 

 (magnet,) the Pohsh, (magnes, magnet, and jnagnet kamien,) 

 and the Vendish of Styria, [magnet,) where, excepting in the 

 modern Greek, the Latin has unquestionably been the medium 

 of transporting the word from the ancient Greeli. 



Another name in use in several European idioms, as in the 

 Greek, Itah'an, French, the Romance language of Surset, the 

 Bosnian, Croatian, and the Vendish of Styria, is calamdta. This 

 word appears to be of Greek origin, and is given by Pliny as the 

 name of a small green frog. The application of the term to the 

 magnet is explained by a fancied resemblance to that animal in 

 the magnetic needle, when poised on water by means of small 

 reeds, projecting beneath it like the legs of a frog in motion, ac- 

 cording to the usual mode in early times, in Europe, of adapting 

 it to the mariner's use. But that the idea of such a resemblance 

 was not original in Europe, one might be led to suspect, from 

 the analogy of the Birman name for the compass anghmyaoimg, 

 which signifies lizard, and will be rendered still more probable 

 by evidence, hereafter to be given, that this mode of using the 

 magnetic needle in navigation, was adopted in China about eighty 

 years previous to the earliest mention of the needle itself in any 

 European writer. 



Many of the terms applied to the magnet, both in European and 

 Asiatic languages, allude to one or another of its characteristic 

 properties. Among these, the French Vaimant, the lover, and 

 the Spanish and Portuguese iman, with the same signification, 

 is particularly worthy of notice, as having its precise correspond- 

 ent in the Chinese thsu chy, of which a celebrated Chinese nat- 

 uralist who flourished in 1580, observes : " if this stone had not 

 a love for the iron, it would not make it come to it," and a wri- 

 ter of an age eight centuries earlier : " The magnet draws the 

 iron like a tender mother, who causes her children to come to 

 her, and it is for this reason, that it has received its name." In 

 India also, the magnet was of old personified as capable of ten- 

 der attachment, in the Sanscrit name thouinhaka, the kisser, from 

 which are derived several appellations now in use in that coun- 

 try, as tchoumbok in the Bengalee, and tcham,hak in the Hindos- 

 tanee. Another Sanscrit term for the magnet is ayaskdnta, the 

 loved stone, or ayaskdnta-mani, the stotie loved by iroti, which 

 also the Bengalee retains ; and in the Cingalese the magnet bears 

 the name of kdndako-galah, the stone that loves, which is ap- 



