Alexander Neckam on the Compass‐Needle

Abstract

The four‐hundredth anniversary of William Gilbert's birth has been commemorated by a special meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine on April 5; an address was given by Professor Sydney Chapman on “William Gilbert and the Science of his time,” and has been published in Nature [154, 132–136 (1944)]. His work, “De Magnete,” first published in the year 1600 and made readily accessible by the translation issued for the Gilbert Club in 1900, is well known to all who are interested in the history of the magnetic compass and of terrestrial magnetism. It is regrettable that the “De Naturis Rerum,” by Alexander Neckam, written about 1190, seems to be known to few, since it contains an account of the use of the directional property of a magnet as early as any in Europe. Full credit is however given to Neckam by A. Crichton Mitchell in his “Chapters in the history of terrestrial magnetism” [Terr. Mag., 37, 105–146 (1932)].