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Magnes, Loadstone

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MAGNES.                                        223
feeling and hands. What more contumacious than the hardness of Iron ? She hath bestowed upon it both feet and complaisance : it is attracted by the Loadstone ; and that metal, the subduer of all things, runs to meet something or other that is bodiless (inane), and when it comes near leaps towards it, is held by it, and clasps it in its embraces. Hence is it termed Sideritis; and by others, for the same reason, Heraclios, or the stone of Hercules." Claudian has an elegant poem (Id. y.) upon a shrine, containing a statue of Venus made of Loadstone, and another of Mars in iron. When the festival of their marriage was celebrated these statues were brought near, and by mutual attraction appeared to fly into each other's arms. There can be no doubt the poet is describing what he had himself witnessed.
Dinochares (or Timochares) the architect had, according to Pliny (xxxiv. 42), commenced vaulting over the temple of Arsinoe, at Alexandria, with blocks of Loadstone, with the idea that her statue, to be made of iron, would thus remain suspended in mid-air. Hence the source of the mediœval fable concerning Mahomet's coffin thus balanced in his monument at Mecca. The Romans were acquainted with the fact that the Loadstone com­municates its virtue to iron ; they amused themselves by putting together a series of magnetized iron rings, so as to form a long chain by their cohesion. Iron 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 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 this 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 regarded as talismans, the use of Camahen as denoting an en­graved stone, par excellence, and its introduction in that sense into Europe by the Crusaders, furnish a plausible explanation of the origin of the much disputed term Cameo, originally written Camaut. (See Cameo.)
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