apparently that made in the fragmentary Oeneus of Euripides, which Suidas' quotes, and which distinctly refers to the attraction of the lodestone for the iron. The subject takes definite form, however, in the Ion of Plato; and there, in the following words, Socrates describes the famous rings:

"The gift which you have of speaking excellently about Homer, is not an art," says the sage, "but, as I was just saying, an inspiration: there is a divinity moving you, like that in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. For that stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them similar power of attracting other rings: and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another, so as to form quite a long chain; and all of these derive their powers of suspension from the original stone. Now, this is like the Muse who first gives to men inspiration herself, and from those inspired, her sons, a chain of other persons is suspended, who will take the inspiration from them.

Plato lived between the years 429 and 348 B. C., and from his time forward the rings of Samothrace are described again and again. Lucretius, writing three centuries later, refers to them as still potent. Their wellestablished existence shows that the Samothracian wonder-workers not only were familiar with the attractive power of the lodestone, but with its capability of inducing a similar power in iron. The popular belief that everything which produces wonderful effects must have wonderful properties, and the converse popular tendency which seeks a cause for any effect not understood, in things concerning which prevailing ignorance is still deeper, were fully as strong in those ancient days as they are now. For precisely the same reason that the modern "magnetotherapist" plays upon the imagination of the patient, or

1Suidas: Lex. Graec. et. Lat. post T. Gaisford, Halle, 1853, 658. Jowett, B. The Dialogues of Plato.

THE SAMOTHRACIAN RINGS.

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the charlatan sells to the credulous so-called "magnetic" panaceas for every ailment, so the priests of Samothrace drove a thriving trade in their magnetized iron rings as amulets and cure-alls. They were worn by the worshippers of the Cabiri, later by the Roman priests of Jupiter, and in Pliny's time they became the usual pledge of betrothal.

The Cabiri were remembered long after their individual cult had disappeared. They became converted into the gnomes and the elves of the legends and folk-tales of the Middle Ages, and in the first modern treatises on mining we find them still depicted as dwarfs with their picks and shovels and attended by their dogs, searching for the metals in the depths of the earth. Even so skillful a miner as George Agricola,' whose great work begins the present science of metallurgy, cannot divest himself of a half-belief in them; for in his quaint pictures he always shows them at work in the mines, although often amid machinery which the old Greeks who worshiped at Samothrace might well have regarded as the handiwork of higher gods than those which they there adored.

There were many near-by sources for the lodestone which supported and magnetized the Samothracian rings; for iron mines existed not only on the slopes of Mount Ida, and on Elba and Crete, but on the island of Samothrace itself. It was because the magnetic ore was found in the same deposits as the ordinary ores of iron, that the Greeks at first called it "Siderites" or ironstone. Later because of its power of overcoming iron, and of forcing that hard and intractable metal to come to it, they termed it the "Hercules stone," and later still they gave it the name which it still most commonly bears, the magnet, which as Lucretius says comes "from its country, for it had its origin in the native hills of the Magnesians." This, of course, is widely at variance with Pliny's fanciful derivation of the same name.

1Agricola: De Re Metallica, 1556.

Lucretius, however, who wrote many centuries after the event, is probably in error, for there is little, if any, magnetic iron ore in the hills of ancient Magnesia-the narrow and mountainous strip of land on which rise Mounts Ossa and Pelion, and which formed the most easterly province of Thessaly. The Magnetes-as the inhabitants called themselves—were, in fact, hemmed in between sea and mountains. The last formed a serviceable barrier against the Thesprotians when this tribe made its irruption into Thessaly; but when, through natural increase of population, the territory of the Magnetes became too restricted for their needs, there was no alternative but to cross the Ægean and seek new footholds on the Asiatic continent, where, Pliny says, they founded the city of Magnesia in Ionia. But a later arrival of Æolians drove them northward, and they established a second city, also named Magnesia, beside Mount Sipylus in Lydia. It is conjectured that their national pride caused them to retain the name of their old home for both settlements: a theory which gains support from the fact that the Æolians and Ionians, in founding new towns, were accustomed to adopt for them local designations.' It is this second Magnesia which is most reasonably supposed to have given its name to the magnet, because of the large deposits of magnetic ore, similar to that found at Elba, which still exist in its vicinity and which were probably the ancient source of supply. The town itself was destroyed by an earthquake in the time of Tiberius.

If this emigration of the Magnetes ever occurred, it happened before 700 B. C., and possibly before 1000 B. C., the latter being generally regarded as the period when the colonizing movement of the ancient tribes ended; but, like all such traditions, it is unsafe to accept it as a historical fact. Another version of the same story is that the Magnesians settled in both Lydia and Ionia on their return from Troy; still another makes them out, not willing

1Abbott, E. A.: History of Greece, New York, 1888.

THE ORIGIN OF THE MAGNET.

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emigrants, but fugitives flying from Greece, and a third brings them, not from Thessaly at all, but from Delphoi.'

3

Divested of speculation, there remains simply the fact that there was a town of Magnesia close to a large bed of magnetite. Klaproth notes that this same settlement was called "Heraclea," whence the Greek term "stone of Heraclea" for the magnet; but there was also a town of Heraclea near the first Magnesia, and several other settlements, similarly named, in widely separated parts of Greece and Asia Minor, so that this derivation is also in doubt. Indeed, Pliny' regards the name "stone of Heraclea" or "Heraclea-lithos," not as based on locality, but as meaning "Herculean stone," for the reason already given, namely, the conquering power of the magnet over iron; and Professor Schweigger," with labored ingenuity, goes even further, and asserts that "Herculean" and "magnetic" mean the same thing, and that the entire ancient myth of Hercules merely symbolized the natural strength of the magnet.

To these early traditions of the Greeks and Syrians, research into the dim historical annals of other peoples, existing at that far distant time, adds nothing of importance. A familiarity with electrical (or magnetic) effects is often attributed to the Egyptians of the Pharaonic periods; but this seems to be without trustworthy foundation. No legends of magnetic rocks or mountains on Egyptian territory have been encountered. But one Egyptian iron mine shows any signs of having been anciently worked, and, there the ore is of the specular or red, and not of the magnetic variety. Lepsius considers that iron or steel do

1Cox, G. W.: A History of Greece, London, 1874.

"Trans. Phil. Soc., Cambridge; and Athenaeum, Jan. 4, 1834. See, also, Wilkin's Ed. of Works of Sir T. Browne. London, 1883.

L'Invention de la Boussole, Paris, 1834.

5 Ennemoser: History of Magic, London, 1854.

* Lib. xxxvi.

"Wilkinson: Anc. Egyptians, Boston, 1883, ii., 250. Rawlinson : Hist. of Anc. Egypt, London, 1881, 93.

2

not occur at all in the old empire, but only in the new.' Rawlinson, on the other hand, while conceding the strength of the theory that iron was first introduced into Egypt by the Ptolemies, notes that some implements of the metal have been found in the tombs, with nothing about them indicative of their belonging to a late period; and that a scrap of iron plate was discovered by Vyse in the masonry of the Great Pyramid. He also points out that the paucity of such instances may be partially, if not wholly, accounted for by the rapid decay of iron in the nitrous Egyptian earth, or when oxidized by exposure to the air; so that, as he says, the most judicious of modern Egyptologists seem to hold that, while the use of iron in Pharaonic times was at best rare and occasional, nevertheless the metal was not wholly unknown, and may have been brought into the country from Phoenicia, in a manufactured state.

In such circumstances it is hardly possible to assume any Egyptian knowledge of the lodestone, due to direct discovery of it. The only apparently explicit evidence which has been encountered is the statement of Plutarch, that the Egyptian priest Manetho, who lived about three centuries before our era, and who wrote a history of his country for the Greeks who had recently settled there, reported that the Egyptians of a far distant period called the magnet the "bone of Horus," and the iron the "bone of Typhon." But Manetho's work, when Plutarch wrote about it, was six centuries old and existed only in the form of epitomes which were mutually conflicting, while his chronology is now known to be unreliable.3

It has been suggested that such iron as has been found in Egypt, and referred to Pharaonic times, may have been

1Lepsius: Die Metalle in den Aegyptischen Inschriften, 1872, 105, 114. Peschel: The Races of Man, New York, 1876, 488.

2 Hist. of Anc. Egypt, i., 505.

Rawlinson, cit. sup., ii, 6, 8. Cox: History of Greece, i., 614, Appendix D, wherein Manetho's chronology is fully discussed.