166 
be found in his “ De Civitate Dei,” a work believed to have 
been begun A.D. 413. It seems probable that this passage 
in St. Augustine suggested the notion either to Porta, Bembo, 
or some early Italian writer, and that thus it came to be, 
as Sir Thomas Browne says, “whispered thorow the world.” 
“Note on a Passage in Strada containing a Prevision of 
the Electric Telegraph,” by William E. A. Axon, M.B.S.L., 
F.S.S. 
The interesting quotation from Hakewill’s Apology 
brought by Mr. Grimshaw before the last meeting of this 
Society, seems to need an additional word of comment. 
Hakewill, it will be remembered, quotes a passage of Latin 
verse from Strada in which he supposes the loadstone to 
have such virtue that “ if two needles be touched with it, 
and then balanced on separate pivots, and the one be turned 
in a particular direction, the other will sympathetically 
move parallel to it. He then directs each of these needles 
to be poised and mounted on a dial having the letters of 
the alphabet arranged round it. Accordingly, if one person 
has one of the dials and another the other, by a little pre- 
arrangement as to details, a correspondence can be main- 
tained between them at any distance by simply pointing 
the needles to the letters of the required words.” The date 
of the first edition of Hakewill’s Apologie or Declaration of 
the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the 
World is 1627 ; but the work of Strada’s from which he 
quotes was published ten years earlier. Famianus Strada 
was born at Rome in 1572, and his Prolusiones Academecise 
et Paradigmata Eloquentise appeared at Rome in 1617. 
Several editions of his Prolusiones have been printed in 
this country. The particular poem referring to the load- 
stone has been translated into English and is printed in 
“The Student or Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany,” 1750. 
The passage is referred to by Addison in a paper in the 
