The Old Ashmolean : the oldest museum for the history of the natural sciences and medicine / by R.T. Gunter.

  • Gunther, R. T. (Robert Theodore), 1869-1940.
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Old Ashmolean : the oldest museum for the history of the natural sciences and medicine / by R.T. Gunter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    In the seventeenth century lodestones were commonly carried to restore polarity to the compass needles of sundials, as well as for more occult properties. The most interesting example in the collection is undoubtedly the Terrella, not only on account of the rarity of such forms of lodestones, but on account of their historical association with Charles II and the early members of the Royal Society, who were able with the aid of a Terrella and of a few small iron rods repre¬ senting men in miniature, to study and visualize the problem of antipodes. Magnetic Compass Many nations, the Chinese, the Arabs, the Greeks, the Etruscans, the Finns, and the Italians, have each in their turn been credited with the discovery of the Compass. There has been a tendency to push the invention of this instrument farther and farther back into the past, and thus it has acquired a mythical origin in which all record of the real inventor has been lost. So though as remote an antiquity as 26,84 b.c. has been attributed to the compass of the Chinese, the first authentic record of a Chinese marine compass is no older than a.d. 1297, three centuries after the floating compass was in use among the citizens of Amalfi. It has recently been argued that the ‘ South Pointing Chariots ’ or Indicators of the South, which were used by the very early Emperors of China on their journeys, and have been supposed by Padre Bertelli and others to have been magnetic needles, were merely mechanical contrivances used for indicating the south, which depended for their orientation on cogwheels rather than upon magnetism. In its construction the Chinese