Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/118

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96
WILLIAM GILBERT

power of the stone and of the earth does not promote anything but the unity and conformity of disjoined bodies, it comes about that everywhere at an equal distance from the centre or from the circumference, just as it seems to attract perpendicularly at one place, so at another it is able even to dispose and to turn, provided the stone is not uneven in virtue. For if at the distance C from the pole D the stone is able to allure a versorium, at an equally long interval above the æquator at A that stone can also direct and turn the versorium. So the very centre and middle of the terrella is the centre of its virtue, and from this to the circumference of the orbe (at equal intervals on every side) its magnetick virtues are emitted. Magnetick virtues emitted to an orbe.

CHAP. XXVIII.

A Loadstone attracts magneticks not only to a
fixed point or pole, but to every part of a
terrella save the æquinoctial zone.

Coitions are always more powerful when poles are near poles, since in them by the concordancy of the whole there exists a stronger force; wherefore the one embraces the other more strongly. Places declining from the poles have attractive forces, but a little weaker and languid in the ratio of their distance; so that at length on the æquinoctial circle they are utterly enervated and evanescent. Neither do even the poles attract as mathematical points; nor do magneticks come into conjunction by their own poles, only on the poles of a loadstone. But coition is