SUPPLEMENT, 
10 
Gassendus adduces, as an argument of the French having 
been the inventors of the compass, that the north point is al¬ 
ways marked with a fleur de lis. As to the pretence of Goro- 
pins, that the compass must be the invention of the Danes, Dutch 
or Germans, because the thirty-two points of it are written and 
pronounced in the Dutch or Teutonic language, has no better 
grounds than the English claim from the words compass or box, 
Vincentius Belluacensis, and Albertus Magnus, who lived about 
the year 1245, as well as Livinus Lemnius, make mention of the 
direction of the poles of the magnet, as is seen from a tract de 
lapidibus , which has been attributed to Aristotle, but is supposed 
to have been the work of some Arabian author, a little or about 
their own time, which tract has been since lost. 
Francis Gabius, a jesuit of Ferrara, says that the first thing he 
knows professedly written on the direction or verticity of the 
magnet, was an epistle of Petrus Peregrinus Gallus, about the 
latter end of the thirteenth century, and that the peregrinations of 
this same Peter, in magnetical philosophy, were not far from the 
truth. A few years after, this epistle was clandestinely altered, 
and in some degree mutilated, by one John Tasnier, who pub¬ 
lished it in his own name, under the title of Opusculum perpetua 
memoria dignissimum de natura et effectibus magnetis. Some 
authors of note affirm, that this Petrus Peregrinus was no other 
than an assumed name of the English friar Bacon, who flourished 
in the thirteenth century. 
Amongst the manuscripts of the university of Leyden there is 
a volume containing many scientific tracts, one of which is a letter 
of Peter Adsiger, which is dated in the year 1269, and contains 
an account of almost all the properties of the magnet, as they are 
known at the present day. The attraction, repulsion, directive 
property of the magnet, the communication of those properties 
to iron, the construction of the azimuth compass, the use of the 
magnetic needle, and the variation, are explicitly laid down in a 
curious letter, which is entitled, Epistola Petri Adsigerii t in 
signationibus natures magnetis, and published by Cavallo, in the 
second edition of his treatise on magnetism. 
The important discovery of the inclination or dip of the mag- 
