"Lodestone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... matters set in the ring, which in the Middle Ages were regarded as precious: crystal, emblematic of chastity of body and soul; ligurite, resembling amber, more especially figurative of the quality of temperance; lodestone, which attracts iron, as She touches the chords of repentant hearts with ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... to the same writer (among other pieces which he probably did not write) "Pathomachia; or, Love's Loadstone," published in 1630, upon which point Reed observes:—"Whoever was the real author of 'Lingua,' there is some plausibility in assigning to him also 'Pathomachia; or, Love's Lodestone,' for they are certainly written upon the same plan, and very much in the same stile, although the former is considerably superior to the latter, both in design and execution. The first scene of 'Pathomachia' contains an allusion by Pride, one of the characters, to 'Lingua,' where it is said, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... preservative of picture-frames from the defilement of flies. Bacon gravely tells of a man who lived for several days on the smell of onions and garlic alone; and there was an old belief that the garlic could extract all the power from a loadstone. ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... like Mahomet, &c.] It is reported of Mahomet the great impostor, that having built a mosque, the roof whereof was of loadstone, and ordering his corpse, when he was dead, to be put into an iron coffin, and brought into that place, the loadstone soon attracted it near the top, where it still hangs in the air. No less fabulous is what the ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... But the difficulties inherent in either subject are not surmounted throughout with absolute equality of success; the very point of appeal to the sympathy and excitement of the time may have been something of a disturbing force in the composition of the work—a loadstone rock indeed, of tempting attraction to the patriot as well as to the playwright, but possibly capable of proving in some measure a rock of offence to the poet whose ship was piloted towards it. His perfect triumph in the field of patriotic drama, coincident ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... himself with a miserable grim satisfaction that he was at last over and above it all. She had told him to conquer his boyish love for her and, as her will had always been law to him, he had made it, at last, a law in this. The touch of the loadstone that never in his life had failed, had failed now, and now, for once in his life, desire and duty ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... easily discovered the limestone heap raised by Ross; he ran to it; an opening allowed him to see, in the interior, the tin case in which James Ross had placed the official report of his discoveries. No living being seemed to have visited this desolate coast for the last thirty years. In this spot a loadstone needle, suspended as delicately as possible, immediately moved into an almost vertical position under the magnetic influence; if the centre of attraction was not immediately under the needle, it could only be ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... possess the attributes of the unmanifest.[719] As a vast tree is ensconced within a small unblown Aswattha flower and becomes observable only when it comes out, even so birth takes place from what is unmanifest. A piece of iron, which is inanimate, runs towards a piece of loadstone. Similarly, inclinations and propensities due to natural instincts, and all else, run towards the Soul in a new life.[720] Indeed, even as those propensities and possessions born of Ignorance and Delusion, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Chinese before the year 121, in which year a famous Chinese dictionary was completed, wherein the word magnet is defined as "the name of a stone which gives direction to a needle." This proves not only that they knew the attractive properties of the loadstone, and its power of imparting these properties to metal, but also that they were aware of the polarity of a magnetised needle. Another Chinese dictionary, published between the third and fourth centuries, speaks of ships being guided in their course to the south by means of the magnet; and ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... heard. He imagined himself to be drawn into one of those fantastic intrigues one meets in dreams. He, however, darted not the less quickly toward Milady, yielding to that magnetic attraction which the loadstone exercises over iron. ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... they sawe with vs, as Mathematicall instruments, sea compasses, the vertue of the loadstone in drawing yron, a perspectiue glasse whereby was shewed manie strange sightes, burning glasses, wildefire woorkes, gunnes, bookes, writing and reading, spring clocks that seeme to goe of themselues, and manie other thinges that wee had, were so straunge vnto them, and so farre exceeded their ...
— A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land Of Virginia • Thomas Hariot
... crystal walls of the dazzling lantern overhead the night before. There is a tendency with such migratory birds as are on the wing at night to fly very high. But the great, glaring, piercing, single eye of Montauk light seems to draw into it by dozens, as a loadstone pulls a magnet, its feathered victims, and they swerve in their course and make straight for it. As they flash nearer and nearer, the light, of course, grows brighter and brighter, and at length they dash into what appears a sea of fire, to be crushed lifeless by the heavy glass, and they fall ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... knight, and you, fair virgin, here are two little boxes of white ivory, of the same size and weight; and see, within each of them is suspended a little magnet, both cut from the one loadstone, and round in a circle are all the letters of the alphabet. Now, let each of you take a little box, carry it delicately, and by its help you can converse with each other though you were a hundred miles apart. This sympathy between you is established ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... all kinds, set in jewels, amongst which I was desired to observe a crucifix, that they assured me had spoke very wisely to the emperor Leopold. I won't trouble you with a catalogue of the rest of the lumber; but I must not forget to mention a small piece of loadstone that held up an anchor of steel too heavy for me to lift. This is what I thought most curious in the whole treasure. There are some few heads of ancient statues; but several of them are defaced by modern additions. I foresee that you will be very ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... choicest place of earth filled him with wonder. There was a tree such as he had never seen before; its branches were alike, but it bore flowers and fruit of a thousand kinds. Near it a reservoir had been fashioned of four sorts of stone—touchstone, pure stone, marble, and loadstone. In and out of it flowed water like attar. The prince felt sure this must be the place of the Simurgh; he dismounted, turned his horse loose to graze, ate some of the food Jamila had given him, drank of the stream and lay ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... good deal of Struggling and Difficulty, reach'd into the Ring and Centre of that mix'd Multitude. But how did I blush? with what Confusion did I appear? when I found one of my own Countrymen, a drunken Granadier, the attractive Loadstone of all that high and low Mob, and the Butt of all their Merriment? It will be easily imagin'd to be a Thing not a little surprizing to one of our Country, to find that a drunken Man should be such a wonderful Sight; However, the witty Sarcasms that were then by high and low thrown upon ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... single subject of grammar, a topic rendered only more tenebrific by the labours of his successors, and which seems still to possess an attraction for authors in proportion as they can make nothing of it. A singular loadstone for theologians, also, is the Beast in the Apocalypse, whereof, in the course of my studies, I have noted two hundred and three several interpretations, each lethiferal to all the rest. Non nostrum est tantas componere lites, yet I have myself ventured upon a ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... apparent. Still, as no previous idea was conceived of this latent principle, and consequently no search made, no endeavours exerted, to bring it to light, I see not the impossibility a priori of its remaining almost as long concealed from mankind as the properties of the loadstone or the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... beginning of things. Fortune was there for any man. The town became a loadstone for the restless population ever crowding out upon the uttermost frontier. The men from the farther East dropped their waistcoats and their narrow hats at Ellisville. All the world went under wide felt and bore a jingling spur. Every man was armed. The pitch of ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... with the mathematics; for these were the arts which had a kind of primogeniture with them severally. So have the alchemists made a philosophy out of a few experiments of the furnace; and Gilbertus our countryman hath made a philosophy out of the observations of a loadstone. So Cicero, when reciting the several opinions of the nature of the soul, he found a musician that held the soul was but a harmony, saith pleasantly, Hic ab arte sua non recessit, &c. But of these conceits Aristotle ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... of pursuits which occupied his attention, was the examination of the properties of the loadstone. In 1607, he commenced his experiments; but, with the exception of a method of arming loadstones, which, according to the report of Sir Kenelm Digby, enabled them to carry twice as much weight as before, he does not seem to have made any additions to our knowledge of magnetism. ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... that the Chinese are very clever. They found out how to print, and they found out how to make gunpowder, and they found out the use of the loadstone. What is that? A piece of steel rubbed against the loadstone will always point to the north. The Chinese found out these three things, printing, gunpowder, and the use of the loadstone, before we ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... was a kind of analogical illustration of those physical laws, in virtue of which Like flies to Like. He regarded this power of attraction in wealth to draw wealth to it, as something remarkably interesting and curious—something indefinably allied to the loadstone and gravitation. Bishop, who had ambled back to earth again when the present theme was broached, acquiesced. He said it was indeed highly important to Society that one in the trying situation of unexpectedly finding ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Tropical fruits. Prickly pears. Their use. The "Water-Throat." Silver-works. Volcano of Jorullo. Cascade of Regla. "Eyes of Water." Fires. The Hill of Knives. Obsidian implements. Obsidian mines. The Stone-age. The loadstone-mountain of Mexico. Unequal Civilization of the Aztecs. Silver and commerce of Mexico. Effect of Protection-duties. Silver mines. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Several from twenty to thirty carats have been dug up. At Mompava there are said to be very rich copper mines; but from want of population, a vigorous government, and scientific mineralogists, little is to be hoped from them at the present day. At Pulo Bongorong, near Borneo Proper, there is plenty of loadstone found. ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... said to have listened to the whimsical proposal of Dinochares, the architect, to build a room of loadstone in Arsinoe's tomb, so that an iron statue of the queen should hang in the air between the floor and the roof. But the death of the king and of the architect took place before this was tried. He set up there, however, her statue six ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Hotel. On the morning of the 11th he came down to breakfast to find the streets white and the air thick with snow. A wild northwester was blowing down from the mountains, one of those beautiful storms that wrap Denver in dry, furry snow, and make the city a loadstone to thousands of men in the mountains and on the plains. The brakemen out on their box-cars, the miners up in their diggings, the lonely homesteaders in the sand hills of Yucca and Kit Carson Counties, begin to think of Denver, muffled in snow, full of food and drink and good cheer, and to yearn for ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... and breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses and prison vaults—it was a giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a place besieged; the shopmen, like the Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the stick's end, frowned ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spake the iron to the loadstone: "I hate thee most, because thou attractest, but art too ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... mine is based on a syllogism. All nations of the world are moved by interest, which is the loadstone of hearts. We see men going down, as they have gone, into the depths of hell for silver and gold; no one can doubt this axiom, and it has no need of proof. The minor premise is this, founded on experimental knowledge—namely, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... says Faraday, 'I mean a body through which lines of magnetic force are passing, and which does not by their action assume the usual magnetic state of iron or loadstone.' Faraday subsequently used this term in a different sense from that here given, ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... then that I distinctly recognised one of the asserted phenomena of mesmerism. The head of Mademoiselle M—— followed every where, with unerring certainty, the hand of her mesmeriser, and seemed irresistibly attracted to it as iron to the loadstone. At length Mr K—— succeeded in thoroughly awaking his patient, who, on being interrogated respecting her past sensations, said that she retained a recollection of her state of semi-consciousness, during which she much desired ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... keeps them away." She never put such thoughts into words. With an Acadian girl such a thing was impossible But girls do not need words. She drew as potently, and to all appearances as impassively, as a loadstone. All others than Bonaventure she repelled. If now and then she toyed with a heart, it was but to see her image in it once or twice and toss it aside. All got one treatment in the main. Any one of them might ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... The helpless iron and the terrible loadstone! The passive seed! The dissolving cloud and ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... Thompson, F.R.S., has kindly supplied me with the following interesting note on the terrella (or terella): The name given by Dr. William Gilbert, author of the famous treatise, "De Magnete" (Lond. 1600), to a spherical loadstone, on account of its acting as a model, magnetically, of the earth; compass-needles pointing to its poles, as mariners' compasses do to the poles of the earth. The term was adopted by other writers who followed Gilbert, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... personal cause of dislike. We never had many words together," said the landlord. "But he's a man that you want to get as far away from as possible. There are men, you know, who kind of draw you towards them, as if they were made of loadstone; and others that seem to push you off. Captain Allen is one ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... have conceived the soul as a moving principle."[406] Extending this idea, that the soul is a moving principle, he held that all motion in the universe was due to the presence of a living soul. "He is reported to have said that the loadstone possessed a soul because it could move iron."[407] And he taught that "the world itself is animated, and full of gods."[408] "Some think that soul and life is mingled with the whole universe; and thence, perhaps, was that [opinion] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... contributing its share of good and evil. A motley crowd swarms their streets, presenting to the eye of an onlooker the picturesque spectacle that the contrast of costumes always produces. They are people of different colours, dress and education, attracted thither by the loadstone of wealth. The fortunate, the clever, the unscrupulous have already gained the victory in Life's struggles and now ride about in motor-cars of the newest types; the others look at them, most likely envy them, and work all the harder to get rich themselves. Will they succeed? The way, here ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... Sea. Their notion of the Figure of the Earth was not just, for most of them thought that it was a flat extensive plain. Their Knowlege of Astronomy was very much confined; and their Ignorance of the Properties of the Loadstone would prevent their undertaking any Voyage of Consequence. Supposing the Country which Madog discovered was not America, yet to say the Story is a late Invention, and forged after the discovery of that Continent by Columbus, with a View to set up a prior Claim to ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... maintained by a multitude of tradesmen, so many excellent channels made by art and opportune havens, to which they build their cities; all which we have in like measure, or at least may have. But their chiefest loadstone which draws all manner of commerce and merchandise, which maintains their present estate, is not fertility of soil, but industry that enricheth them, the gold mines of Peru, or Nova Hispania may not compare with ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... separate them in a direct line, while they make so small a resistance to a lateral pressure. Such events, as bear little analogy to the common course of nature, are also readily confessed to be known only by experience; nor does any man imagine that the explosion of gunpowder, or the attraction of a loadstone, could ever be discovered by arguments a priori. In like manner, when an effect is supposed to depend upon an intricate machinery or secret structure of parts, we make no difficulty in attributing all our knowledge of it to experience. Who will assert that he can give ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... of the loadstone, or natural magnet. This is a stone which has the power of attracting iron. A steel needle rubbed on it becomes magnetized, as we say, and, when suspended by the center and allowed to move freely, always swings around until it points north and south. Hung on a pivot and inclosed in a box, this ...
— Discoverers and Explorers • Edward R. Shaw
... peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to command. The truth of this seemed evinced in the case of Mad Jack, during the gale, and especially at that perilous moment when he countermanded ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... expansive, nor do I remember his ever becoming enthusiastic over anything or anybody. One who knew nothing of his domestic life might have fancied that he was cold, and certainly he did not possess that social magnetism which made Lowell the loadstone of so many hearts, and made the exercise of that attraction necessary to his own enjoyment of existence. Longfellow adored his wife and children; but beyond that circle, it seemed to me, he had no imperious ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... dull for him, but he seems desirous of coming, and so I want you to help me to make it cheerful for him. To be candid, sis, I think the chance to see you, whom he has heard me say so much about, is the real loadstone. I enclose a bit of paper, and I want you to use it all in any ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle. But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... frankness, this absence of finical conventions, this whole-hearted camaraderie, would hold me more sternly to my path of duty than anything else she might have done? Did the instinct of her sex whisper that each man's heart, however light and worldly, is the possessor of a trusty loadstone which draws the best of him to a woman's aid when her honor is placed unreservedly into his hands? This speaks, of course, of men and not of human beasts; still, a woman is not put to the peril of looking into the heart of a human beast to discover that he is a beast—she ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... fairer commendation of an inn, above the fair sign, or fair lodgings. She is the loadstone that attracts men of iron, gallants and roarers, where they cleave sometimes long, and are not easily got off. Her lips are your welcome, and your entertainment her company, which is put into the reckoning too, and is the dearest parcel ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... verified in our own times. "When electrum (amber)," says Pliny, in the spirit of the Ionic natural philosophy of Thales,* is 'animated' by friction and heat, it will attract bark and dry leaves precisely as the loadstone attracts iron." ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... present race of philosophers, having been long exercised upon electricity, has been lately transferred to magnetism; the qualities of the loadstone have been investigated, if not with much advantage, yet with great applause; and as the highest praise of art is to imitate nature, I hope no man will think the makers of artificial magnets celebrated ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... majority, ant-like in their indefatigable busyness, neither turned a head nor looked up: backs were bent, eyes fixed, in a hard scrutiny of cradle or tin-dish: it was the earth that held them, the familiar, homely earth, whose common fate it is to be trodden heedlessly underfoot. Here, it was the loadstone that drew all men's thoughts. And it took toll of their bodies in odd, exhausting forms of labour, which were swift to weed ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... son, of giving me a twist too much, on more than one occasion. He was introduced, that is, proposed as a member of our club, by Sir Robert Ratsbane, whose grandfather was a druggist, and seconded by Lord Loadstone, the celebrated lady-killer, as a regular pigeon, who dropped, by the death of old 'burn the wind,' into half a million at least. The fellow did appear to be a very capital speculation, but the whole thing, however, was a trick, as I strongly ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... immediate family claims threatening excess of expenditure even beyond the income he was making, that he was fain to write to his sister-in-law: "I begin to feel myself drawn towards America as Darnay in the Tale of Two Cities was attracted to Paris. It is my Loadstone Rock." Too surely it was to be so; and Dickens was not to be saved from the consequence of yielding to the temptation, by any such sacrifice as ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the tongue, or any convulsive effect upon the limbs of a frog, produced. Nor could charcoal or fine wire be ignited (133.). But upon repeating the experiments more at leisure at the Royal Institution, with an armed loadstone belonging to Professor Daniell and capable of lifting about thirty pounds, a frog was very powerfully convulsed each time magnetic contact was made. At first the convulsions could not be obtained on breaking magnetic contact; but conceiving the deficiency ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... local expansion. Compelled, therefore, to break these narrow bonds, it naturally spread in the direction of least resistance. In the second place the decadent Persian Empire, with its fabulous riches and almost limitless plains, was a loadstone that lured on Greek adventurers to attempt feats that seemed incredible. The third reason was Alexander's inherited lust for conquest. His father, Philip of Macedon, had long been accumulating the resources which made it possible for his son to realize his ambitious ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... whether the marvel before our eyes really was at the magnetic pole of the southern regions. All I can say is, that its needle staggered about, helpless and useless. And in fact the exact location of the Antarctic Sphinx mattered little in respect of the constitution of that artificial loadstone, and the manner in which the clouds and metallic lode supplied ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... the less, because the Heavens are more oblique. As for the variation, I believe the star has the quality of all the four quarters, like the needle, which if touched to the east side points to the east, and so of the west, north, and south; wherefore, he that makes a compass covers the loadstone with a cloth, all but its north part, or that which has the power to make the needle point ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... silver were carefully melted, and those of a less valuable metal were contemptuously broken, and cast into the streets, Theophilus labored to expose the frauds and vices of the ministers of the idols; their dexterity in the management of the loadstone; their secret methods of introducing a human actor into a hollow statue; [4711] and their scandalous abuse of the confidence of devout husbands and unsuspecting females. [48] Charges like these may seem to deserve some degree of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... at which we wish to apply the lever and to lift into prominence the moral character-building aim as the central one in education. This aim should be like a loadstone, attracting and subordinating all other purposes to itself. It should dominate in the choice, arrangement, and method ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... tumult of crowds, are to him the same; time itself, which casts the shade of oblivion over so many other remembrances, in vain would tear that tender and sacred recollection from the heart. The needle, when touched by the loadstone, however it may have been moved from its position, is no sooner left to repose, than it returns to the pole of its attraction. So, when I inquired of Paul, as we wandered amidst the plains of Williams,—"Where shall we now go?" he pointed to the north, ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... the cart's head steadily south. This tradition, which only appears as a tradition in one of the dynastic histories of the fifth century A. D., is not given at all in the earlier standard history, and it is by no means proved that the undoubtedly early Chinese knowledge of the loadstone extended to the making of compasses. Yet, as Renan has justly pointed out in effect, in his masterly evidences of Gospel truth, a weak tradition is better worth considering than no tradition at all. Besides, there is some slight indirect confirmation of this, for in 880 B.C. ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... of sixty or seventy years magnetism was almost wholly confined to Germany. Men of sense and learning devoted their attention to the properties of the loadstone; and one Father Hell, a Jesuit, and professor of astronomy at the University of Vienna, rendered himself famous by his magnetic cures. About the year 1771 or 1772 he invented steel-plates of a peculiar form, which he applied to the naked body as a cure for several diseases. In ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... entered the apartment, and, fixing her eyes on the casket, she said with emphasis—"If you display such a loadstone, it will draw many a steel knife to ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... loftier knowledge than that of your science; through that knowledge, duly heeded and cultivated, I hoped to divine what I cannot of myself discover. Therefore I deepened over her mind the spells I command; therefore I have drawn her hither as the loadstone draws the steel, and therefore I would have borne her with me to the shores to which I was about this night to sail. I had cast the inmates of the house and all around it into slumber, in order that none might witness her departure; had I not done so, I should have summoned others ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lachi, sir, is the loadstone, with which the gipsies declare one who knows how to use it can cast any number of spells. If you can make a woman drink a little scrap of it, powdered, in a glass of white wine, she'll never be able to resist you. I answered, as ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... 'sights' to be gone through. The armory said to be the finest in the world; the palace, ditto (which people who are addicted to upholstering may go and see, if they don't mind breaking the tenth commandment); the museum of natural history, where is the largest loadstone in active operation between this and Medina; and the Academia, nearly complete the list. Everybody should devote a morning to the last-named, were it only for the sake of the Murillos. The famous picture of 'St. Isabel giving ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... the captain. "I never met such wonderful people as they tell about, I assure you; nor have I seen the 'Black Loadstone Mountain' or ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... was in this strait when the loadstone drew out the bolts in his ship, though he does not give the latitude and longitude of the place in the story of his adventure," suggested Louis. In the evening the passengers looked at the lights, and retired at ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... copper man who rose from the water to fell the great oak-tree (Kalevala, Runo 2). Compare also the variant in Canto 6 of the Kalevipoeg. We may also remember the copper men connected with the mountain of loadstone (Thousand and One Nights, ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... for which we desire and hope, and we must turn towards God. This should be the daily, hourly exercise of the mind, until the whole turn and bent of our spirit "points as constantly to God as the needle touched with the loadstone does to the north."[36] To be alive in God, before you are dead to your own nature, is "a thing as impossible in itself, as for a grain of wheat to be alive before ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... of a ram quiets an enraged elephant; a viper lies stock-still, if touched with a beechen leaf; a wild bull grows tame, if bound with the twigs of a fig-tree; and amber draws all light things to it, except basil and such as are dipped in oil; and a loadstone will not draw a piece of iron that is rubbed with onion. Now all these, as to matter of fact, are very evident; but it is hard, if not altogether impossible, to find ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... give to any girl that was not a fright. He was a self-deceiver and a general lover, and such characters and their affections sink by nature to where their interest lies. Iron is not conscious, yet it creeps toward the loadstone. Well, while she was with me I held up and managed to question her as coldly as I speak to you now, but as soon as she left me I went off ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... intaglios on stones and gems are commonly of a rude description; but occasionally they exhibit a good deal of delicacy, and sometimes even of grace. They are cut upon serpentine, jasper, chalcedony, cornelian, agate, sienite, quartz, loadstone, amazon-stone, and lapis-lazuli. The usual form of the stone is cylindrical; the sides, however, being either slightly convex or slightly concave, most frequently the latter. [PLATE LXXIX., Fig. 3.] The cylinder is always perforated in the direction of its axis. Besides ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... while he stood, and mused by the shore of the ocean, Thinking of many things, and most of all of Priscilla; And as if thought had the power to draw to itself, like the loadstone, Whatsoever it touches, by subtile laws of its nature, 630 Lo! as he turned to depart, Priscilla ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... inhabited by the Aginnatai. Mercator interprets those islands as Celebes, Gilolo, and Amboina. Ptolemy also mentions the island Agathou Daimonos (Borneo), five Baroussai (Mindanao, Leite, Sebu, etc.), three Sabadeibai (the Java group—Iabadiou) and ten Masniolai where a large loadstone was found. Colin surmises that ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... of Nature, for the increase and multiplication of mankind, and even all other species in the elementary world, hath placed such a magnetic virtue in the womb, that it draws the seed to it, as the loadstone ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... black stone, highs the Magnet Mountain;[FN257] for thither the currents carry us willy-nilly. As soon as we are under its lea, the ship's sides will open and every nail in plank will fly out and cleave fast to the mountain; for that Almighty Allah hath gifted the loadstone with a mysterious virtue and a love for iron, by reason whereof all which is iron travelleth towards it; and on this mountain is much iron, how much none knoweth save the Most High, from the many vessels which have been lost there since the days of yore. The bright ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the famous Peter Puffs. This amazing Needle more truly astonishing and not less useful than the Magnetic one, has this property in common with the latter, that by touching the point of a common needle it communicates its wonderful Virtues to it in the same manner that Loadstone does to Iron. And that no part of this extensive Continent may want the Benefit of this Superlatively excellent Method, Ibrahim Mustapha proposes to touch several Needles in order to have them distributed to different Colonies by which means the Small Pocks may be entirely eradicated ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Egyptians called the loadstone the bone of Haroeri, and iron the bone of Typhon. Haroeri was the son of Osiris and grandson of Rhea, a goddess of the earth, a queen of Atlantis, and mother of Poseidon; Typhon was a wind-god and an evil genius, but also a son ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Egypt, brother, and I shall not acquaint you with it; peradventure it relates to a horse or an ass, or peradventure it relates to a mule or a macho; it does not relate to yourself, therefore I advise you not to inquire about it—Dosta. . . ." He carried a loadstone in his bosom and swallowed some of the dust of it, and it served both for passport and for prayers. When he had to leave Borrow he sold him a savage and vicious she ass, recommending her for the same reason as he bought her, because "a savage and vicious beast ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... "cease to blunder: Stupid alike your hints and wonder. This is a loadstone, and its virtue— Though insufficient to convert you— Makes me a magnet; and afar True am I to my polar star. The pilot leaves the doubtful skies, And trusts to me with watchful eyes; By me the distant world is known, And both the Indies made our own. I am the friend and guide ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... after the time that doubt—in not a few instances the parent of knowledge—had, by throwing cold water on it, extinguished the last funeral pyre of the ultimate Phoenix, and laughed to scorn the gigantic, gold-grubbing pismires of Pliny; the Roc, the Valley of Diamonds, the mountain island of Loadstone, the potentiality of the Talisman, the miraculous virtues of certain drugs, and countless other fables, were accepted and believed by all the nations of the West. One of those drugs, seldom brought to Europe on account of its great demand among the rulers of the East, and its extreme rarity, was ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... with the catholic church. This is even as some natural philosophers, who take upon them to give a reason and cause for all things in nature, when they can find no other, they flee to sympathia physica. When it is asked, wherefore the loadstone doth attract iron rather than other metal? they answer, that the cause thereof is sympathia physica inter magnetem et ferrum. With such kind of etymology doth the Bishop here serve us; yet peradventure he might have given us another cause. If so, my retractation ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... very preaching liver, he loved his church as if it had been his family and he taught his family as if it had been his church";—Warham, the first who preached with notes, and who suffered agonies of doubt respecting the Lord's Supper;—Stone, "both a loadstone and a flint stone," and who set the self-sacrificing example ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ingenuous Ladywell came from the visitors' inn by the shore, a man walking behind him with a quantity of artists' materials and appliances. He went on board the steamer, which this morning had performed the passage in safety. Ethelberta single having been the loadstone in the cliffs that had attracted Ladywell hither, Ethelberta married was the negative pole of the same, sending him away. And thus did a woman put an end to the only opportunity of distinction, on Art-exhibition walls, ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... and calamities; that name shone amid the storm of war, a beacon light to cheer and guide the country's friends; its flame, too, like a meteor, to repel her foes. That name in the days of peace was a loadstone, attracting to itself a whole people's confidence, a whole people's love, and the whole world's respect; that name, descending with all time, spread over the whole earth, and uttered in all the languages belonging to the ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... magnetite, of which loadstone, a natural magnet, is an example, has a metallic, steel lustre and contains 72.4 per cent. of iron.[44] Most of the ores obtained in Pennsylvania and New York are magnetite. The magnetites furnish about one-sixteenth of the output of the ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... Tree of Life flourished; and the mountain north of the Main which was all one emerald. "I think," he said, "that, though no man has ever had the fruition of these marvels, they are likely to be more true than false. I hold that God has kept this land of America to the last to be the loadstone of adventurers, and that there are greater wonders to be seen than any that man has imagined. The pity is that I have spent my best years scratching like a hen at its doorstep instead of entering. I have a notion some day to travel straight ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... thousand persons, whom I hauled up safely and satisfactorily to all parties, at one exhibition. Hoping that you will be able to fix up a lot of magnets that will attract all New York, and volunteering to sit on any part of the loadstone, I am, as ever, your little but sympathizing friend, ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... for the hard metal in armour, while Theophrastus applies it to the hardest crystal. By an etymological confusion with the Lat. adamare, to have an attraction for, it also came to be associated with the loadstone; but since the term was displaced by "diamond'' it has had only a figurative and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Myself.—You mean the loadstone, I suppose. Do you believe that a lifeless stone can preserve you from the dangers ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... variation to be no more than 4 degrees. On the 22nd of that month, the needle was in continual agitation, without resting in any of the eight points; which led me to conjecture that we were near some mine of loadstone. ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... a glimmer of the truth seemed to dawn on the early scientists, when they saw the resemblance between the actions of the amber and the loadstone, as both attracted particles. And here another curious thing resulted. Amber will attract particles other than metals. The magnet did not; and from this imperfect observation and understanding, grew a belief that electricity, or magnetism would attract all substances, even human flesh, and ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... she said:—"Dear husband, you were the loadstone that held me longest to the earth, but I have been enabled to give you up at last. I trust you are a Christian, and we shall meet in heaven. Take care of our children, train them up for Christ, keep them from the world." She then prayed for them. After lying still ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... clerkly hand, and set forth with brave flourishes and devices along the margins. In vain Alleyne bethought him of where he was, and of those laws of good breeding and decorum which should restrain him: those colored capitals and black even lines drew his hand down to them, as the loadstone draws the needle, until, almost before he knew it, he was standing with the romance of Garin de Montglane before his eyes, so absorbed in its contents as to be completely oblivious both of where he was and ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... no more sleep for them that night. They lit their pipes, put a specimen of the coal on the table, and made it a kind of loadstone of thought and conversation. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... stationary two days: from that period we have deviated from our course for twenty-one days, and we have no wind to carry us back from the fate which awaits us after this day. To-morrow we shall arrive at a mountain of black stone, called loadstone: the current is now bearing us violently toward it, and the ships will fall in pieces, and every nail in them will fly to the mountain, and adhere to it; for God hath given to the loadstone a secret property by virtue of which ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... own flocks and herds, at the poor man's own ewe- lamb, and set him barking at all the world, as many a poor lover has to do in defence of his morsel of enjoyment, now turned into a mere bone of contention and loadstone for all hungry ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Mr M'Pherson, Minister of Slate, said, he was RESOLVED not to believe it, because it was founded on no principle. JOHNSON. 'There are many things then, which we are sure are true, that you will not believe. What principle is there, why a loadstone attracts iron? Why an egg produces a chicken by heat? Why a tree grows upwards, when the natural tendency of all things is downwards? Sir, it depends upon the degree of evidence that you have.' Young Mr M'Kinnon mentioned one M'Kenzie, who is still alive, who had often fainted in his ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell |
