Part 5

M: p. 14.

Gilbert described the nature of the loadstone in the terms of being that were current with his scholarly contemporaries. This was the same ontology that scholasticism had taught for centuries--the doctrine of form and matter that we have already found in St. Thomas and Nicholas of Cusa. Thus we find Richard Hooker remarking that form gives being and that "form in other creatures is a thing proportionable unto the soul in living creatures." Francis Bacon, in speaking of the relations between causes and the kinds of philosophy, said: "Physics is the science that deals with efficient and material causes while Metaphysics deals with formal and final causes." John Donne expressed the problem of scholastic philosophy succinctly:

This twilight of two yeares, not past or next, Some embleme is of me, ... ... of stuffe and forme perplext, Whose what and where, in disputation is ...

As we shall see, Gilbert continued in the same tradition, but his interpretation of form and formal cause was much more anthropomorphic than that of his predecessors.

Gilbert began his De magnete by expounding the natural history of that portion of the earth with which we are familiar.

Having declared the origin and nature of the loadstone, we hold it needful first to give the history of iron also ... before we come to the explication of difficulties connected with the loadstone ... we shall better understand what iron is when we shall have developed ... what are the causes and the matter of metals ...

His treatment of the origin of minerals and rocks agreed in the main with that of Aristotle, but he departed somewhat from the peripatetic doctrine of the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth. Instead, he replaced them by a pair of elements. (If the rejection of the four Aristotelian elements were clearer, one might consider this a part of his rejection of the geocentric universe but he did not define his position sufficiently.)

Richard Hooker. Of the laws of ecclesiastical polity, bk. 1, ch. 3, sect. 4 (Works, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1865, vol. 1, p. 157)

Francis Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, bk. 3, ch. 4, in Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, Boston, n.d. (1900?), vol. 2, p. 267.

The poems of John Donne, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, London, Oxford University Press, 1933, p. 175 ("To the Countesse of Bedford, On New Yeares Day").

M: pp. 33, 34.

M: pp. 34, 35. Aristotle, Works, ed. W. D. Ross, Oxford, 1908--1952, vol. 2, De generatione et corruptione, translated by H. H. Joachim, 1930, vol. 3, Meteorologica, translated by E. W. Webster, 1931.

M: pp. 34, 35, 64, 65, 69, 81. Dr. H. Guerlac has kindly brought to my attention the similarity between the explanation given in Gilbert and that given in the Meteorologica, bk. 3, ch. 6. p. 378.

M: p. 83.

A statement of the relation between Aristotle's four elements and place can be found in Maier, op. cit. (footnote 17), pp. 143-182.

According to Gilbert the primary source of matter is the interior of the earth, where exhalations and "spiritus" arise from the bowels of the earth and condense in the earth's veins. If the condensations, or humors, are homogeneous, they constitute the "materia prima" of metals. From this "materia prima," various metals may be produced, according to the particular humor and the specificating nature of the place of condensation. The purest condensation is iron: "In iron is earth in its true and genuine nature." In other metals, we have instead of earth, "condensed and fixed salts, which are efflorescences of the earth." If the condensed exhalation is mixed in the vein with foreign earths already present, it forms ores that must be smelted to free the original metal from dross by fire. If these exhalations should happen to pass into the open air, instead of being condensed in the earth, they may return to the earth in a (meteoric) shower of iron.

M: pp. 21, 34, 35, 36, 45.

M: pp. 35, 36, 38, 69; see, however, pp. 42-43: "Iron ore, therefore, as also manufactured iron, is a metal slightly different from the homogenic telluric body because of the metallic humor it has imbibed ..."

M: pp. 19, 34, 36, 37, 42, 69.

M: pp. 35, 36, 37, 38.

M: pp. 38, 63, 69, 84; on p. 34 he says that iron is "more truly the child of the earth than any other metal"; it is the hardest because of "the strong concretion of the more earthy substance."

M: pp. 21, 35, 37, 38.

M: pp. 35, 63.

M: pp. 45, 46.

Gilbert was indeed writing a new physiology, both in the ancient sense of the word and the modern. The process of the formation of metals had many biological overtones, for it was a kind of metallic epigenesis. "Within the globe are hidden the principles of metals and stones, as at the earth's surface are hidden the principles of herbs and plants." In all cases, the "spiritus" acts as semen and blood that inform and feed the proper womb in the generation of animals. "The brother uterine of iron," the loadstone, is formed in this manner. As the embryo of a certain species is the result of the specificating nature of the womb in which the generic seed has been placed, so the kind of metal is the result of a certain humor condensing in a particular vein in the body of the earth.

Gilbert's terminology strongly suggests that he was familiar with alchemical literature, as well as that of medical chemistry. He has been credited as being highly skilled in chemistry. See Sir Walter Langdon-Brown, "William Gilbert: his place in the medical world," Nature, vol. 154, pp. 136-139, 1944.

Ibid., p. 37.

M: pp. 35, 36, 53, 59. See also Galen, op. cit. (footnote 15) bk. 2, ch. 3.