THE WONDERFUL MAGNET
HOW WILD SUPERSTITION SETTLES DOWN INTO SCIENTIFIC REALITY

Everybody knows something of the peculiarities of the magnet. As
a boy you led tiny painted ducks around the water basin, holding
a magnet in your hand, or you owned a horseshoe magnet that would
pick up nails and needles.

You know now in a general kind of way that the magnet is a very
useful as well as a somewhat mysterious thing.

The old Greeks and Romans simply knew that some remarkable iron
ore found in Lydia, near the town of Magnesia, and hence called
magnet, was capable of drawing and holding pieces of metal.

The ancients had the wildest theories concerning the magnet, just
as we have wild theories about things that are new and strange to
us to-day.

They thought that the magnet could be used in cases of sickness,
that it could attract wood and flesh, that it influenced the
human brain, causing melancholy. They believed that the power of
a magnet could be destroyed by rubbing garlic on it, and that
power brought back again by dipping the magnet in goat's blood.
They believed that a magnet could be used to detect bad conduct
in a woman; they believed that it would not attract iron in the
presence of a diamond. They believed much other nonsense quite
as ridiculous as the nonsense that we believe to-day. ----