for the purposes of direction, in most of the leading countries of Asia, including Japan, as well as China, India, and even Arabia. And it is not very unlikely that the leading knowledge of it in Europe, like the art of medicine, was first derived from the Moors; for we find a vague and uncertain acquaintance with it about two centuries after their attacks upon the Goths in Spain.

The earliest notice of the magnet, in the Chinese records, relates to a period of 2,634 years before the birth of our Saviour. This is a questionable date; yet, though we cannot fix the circumstance alluded to with any certainty, there can be no doubt but that the native accounts refer to very ancient times. The Jesuit missionaries, who went to China in the seventeenth century, were rigorous investigators of its claims to such high antiquity; and the celebrated German scholar, Klaproth, as well as Mr. Davis, have both given translations of the passage in which the first application of the magnet is mentioned.

No further notice of the compass is found in the books of China, so far as they have come to the knowledge of Europeans, until about the close of the third century of the Christian era, where, in the dictionary of Poi-wen-yeu-fou, it is stated, that ships were then directed to the south by the needle."

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Many circumstances contribute to the impression that the mariner's compass was first made known in Europe through the communication of the Moorish invaders of Spain, although the knowledge of it has been brought direct from China; first through Marco Polo himself, the celebrated traveller in Cathay, and afterwards by Dr. Gilbert, the physician to Queen Elizabeth. In 1718 a book was published in Paris by Eusebius Renandof, which gives an account of the journey of two Mahommedan travellers in Syria in the ninth century. This book is translated from an Arabic manuscript, which is said to bear all the marks of authenticity: in this it is stated, that at that time the Chinese traded in ships to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea;

and it is hardly possible that they could have constantly performed such long voyages without the aid of a compass. Among the Arabs, it was chiefly used by the explorers of new countries in tracking their way across the sandy deserts, or over the unknown prairie; and we may readily picture to ourselves the turbaned merchant of the olden time, with stout heart and enterprising spirit, sallying forth from his city home, and finding, after a few day's journey, nothing but an apparently endless plain stretching far before him, across which, with the aid of his compass, he would boldly prepare to take his way with his attendants and his camels, in the sure hope of reaching the distant city to which he was journeying.

The following description, translated from the Arabic manuscript alluded to, gives a certain intimation of the knowledge of the properties of the magnet on the eastern seas long before it was generally used in Europe:

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The captains who navigate the Syrian Sea, when the night is so dark as to conceal from view the stars which might direct their course, according to the position of the four cardinal points, take a basin full of water, which they shelter from the wind by placing it in the interior of the vessel. They then drive a needle into a wooden peg or corn stalk, so as to form the shape of a cross, and throw it into the basin of water prepared for the purpose, on the surface of which it floats. They afterwards take a loadstone about the size of the palm of the hand or even smaller, bring it to the surface of the water, give to their hands a rotatory motion towards the right, so that the needle turns round, and then suddenly and quickly withdraw their hands, when the two points of the needle face the north and the south."

An attempt has been made by Professor Hansteen to establish the knowledge of the polarity of the magnet, and its use, among the Norwegians, in the eleventh century; but the work which he quotes in support of his opinion, although unques

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tionably of ancient date, appears to have been tampered with, and the passage on which he relies is not to be found in three of the manuscript copies. There are, indeed, doubts whether the book itself is of older date than the fourteenth century. The compass is, however, minutely described in the satire entitled 'La Bible," which was written by Guyot de Provins, and appeared about the year 1190; but it is evident, from the terms used by him, that it was an instrument but little known, and which had only lately been introduced into Europe. Cardinal Vitrey and Vincent de Beauvais, who were attached to the French army in the crusades, both speak of the compass as a great curiosity which they had seen in the East. De Provins was a minstrel; and as he wrote only some twenty or five-and-twenty years before the cardinal, there is great probability that he obtained his knowledge of the polarity of the magnet, and its application to the purposes of direction, from the same part of the world. It is indeed just such a discovery as was likely to emanate from Arabian genius; and as one reads the statements of these old chroniclers, they carry the mind back to the day of glaive and helm, and the imagination pictures the wild scenery of a Syrian landscape, where a party of bewildered travellers, composed of such as the three persons we have mentioned, are seated by the side of some out-pouring fount, which, as it wells through the green sward, reflects in its crystal surface the rich hues of an eastern clime. Around are scattered the towering and broken hills, clad with the scanty foliage of climbing shrubs, and, now and then, a dark luxuriant cedar of mighty growth. There, seated beneath a lofty rock, with its rude broken front stained by the hues of centuries, and here and there green with vegetation, are the three individuals who first gave authentic information to Europe of that invention which was destined to set at nought utterness of darkness, and fog, and wind, and rain, and unite as it were together the most distant families of the earth. There sits the

cardinal, half soldier, half priest, clad in his tonsure, and girt with his two-handed sword; De Beauvais, with helm by his side, guarded at all points by his supple chain-armour;

and De Provins, who has just laid aside the lute with which he had beguiled his hearers and the time, listening to the strange accounts of the dark-bearded and turbaned traveller, who, with the small compass in his hand, is pointing to the direction they must take to rejoin their friends.

Thus much appears to be established, that before the third crusade the knowledge of the use of the compass for land purposes had been obtained from the East, and that by the year

1269 it was common in Europe. Its use for the purpose of navigation, in this part of the world, was first ascribed to Flavio Gioja, a Neapolitan, born at Amalfi, and its application was said to have been made about the beginning of the fourteenth century. But it is evident, from what has been already observed, that it was known, as a nautical instrument, long before his period; and there is evidence in the "Tresor" of Brunetto, the master of the great Italian poet Dante, that it was not a rarity in his time. How Gioja's name became associated so prominently with the history of the compass, does not appear; but it is probable that he either greatly improved it by the appendage of the card, or brought it into more general use.

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We do not find the magnet mentioned earlier in our English records than the reign of Edward III.; it was then known by the name of the " sail-stone," or adamant,” and the compass was called the sailing-needles, or dial, though it is long after this period before we find the word compass. A ship called the Plenty sailed from Hull in 1338, and we find that she was steered by the sailing-stone. In 1345, that is, five hundred years ago, another entry occurs, which states that one of the King's ships, called the George, brought over sixteen horologies from Sluys in Normandy, and that money had been paid at the same place for twelve stones, called adamants or sail-stones, and for "repairing divers instruments pertaining to a ship."

The construction of the mariner's compass is as follows:A magnetized needle is balanced on a pivot raised from a circular card, on which the points of the compass are described; the chief of them, or the cardinal points, as they are termed— from the word carda, a hinge or pivot-showing those which are intermediate between the east, west, north, and south. This card is also connected sideways by similar pivots to a frame formed of what are called concentric circles. These are represented by two hoops, placed so as to cross each other, and the card is suspended just in the centre of the two, so that which