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Magnes, Loadstone

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MAGNES.
171
likelihood the source of the mediaeval fable concerning Mahomet's coffin thus balanced in his monument at Mecca. The Romans were acquainted with the fact that the Load­stone communicates its virtues to iron ; they amused them­selves by putting together a series of magnetized iron rings, so as to form a long chain by their cohesion. The metal thus magnetized was called by the ignorant vulgar " Quick Iron," and supposed to inflict more dangerous wounds.
The Gold Magnet of Ben Mansur is evidently nothing more than the Magnetic Iron-Pyrites : its property of attracting gold being a mere theoretical inference based upon its colour. The same holds for his Silver Magnet. His Camahen or Ass-stone, " very hard, but which breaks up into splinters," is clearly our Magnetic Iron-Ore, called improperly Black Hematite. His epithet exactly applies to its grey colour. Now, taking into account the general use of this substance in ancient Persia for intagli (in his age universally regarded as talismans), the word Camahen as denoting an engraved stone of special importance, and its introduction in that sense into Europe by the Crusaders, furnish a plausible explanation of the origin of the much-disputed term, Cameo. (See Cameo.)
The earliest, also the latest, essays of the Glyptic art amongst the ancients were made upon the Loadstone. It is the favourite material for the Assyrian cylinders, and equally so for the Cuphic signets, which close the history of Oriental intagli. So common a materia] was disdained by the Greek engravers, and after their example by the Romans, until the diffusion of Eastern doctrines in the third century brought the substance again into favour as an amulet, and the Gnostics (at least those sects whose tenets had rather a Persian than an Alexandrian root) used it very largely in the manufacture of their talismans. As may be well supposed, nothing valuable in the artistic
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