Iron ore attracts iron ore.

From various substances iron (like all the rest of the *metals) is extracted: such substances being stones, earth, and similar concretions which miners call veins because it is in veins[83], as it were, that they are generated. We have spoken above of the variety of these veins.

If a properly coloured ore of iron and a rich one (as miners call it) is placed, as soon as mined, upon water in a bowl or any small vessel (as we have shown before in the case of a loadstone), it is attracted by a similar piece of ore brought near by hand, yet not so powerfully and quickly as one loadstone is drawn by another loadstone, but slowly and feebly.

Ores of iron that are stony, cindery, dusky, red, and several more of other colours, do not attract one another mutually, nor are they attracted by the loadstone itself, even by a strong one, no more than wood, or lead, silver, or gold.

Take those ores and burn, or rather roast them, in a moderate fire, so that they are not suddenly split up, or fly asunder, keeping up the fire 10 or 12 hours, and gently increasing it, then let them grow cold, skill being shown in the direction in which they are placed:

These ores thus prepared a loadstone will now draw, and they now show a mutual sympathy, and when skilfully arranged run together by their own forces.

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CHAP. X. Iron ore has poles, and acquires them, and settles itself toward the poles of the universe.

Deplorable is man’s ignorance in natural science, and modern philosophers, like those who dream in darkness, need to be aroused, and taught the uses of things and how to deal with them, and to be induced to leave the learning sought at leisure from books alone, and that is supported only by unrealities of arguments and by conjectures.

For the knowledge of iron (than which nothing is in more common use), and that of many more substances around us, remains unlearned; iron, a rich ore of which, placed in a vessel upon water, by an innate property of its own directs itself, just like the loadstone, North and South, at which points it rests, and to which, if it be turned aside, it reverts by its own inherent vigour.

But many ores, less perfect in their nature, which yet contain amid stone or earthy substances plenty of iron, have no such motion; but when prepared by skilful treatment in the fires, as shown in the foregoing chapter, they acquire a polar vigour (which we call verticity[84]); and not only the iron ores in request by miners, but even earth merely charged with ferruginous matter, and many rocks, do in like manner tend and lean toward those portions of the heavens, or more truly of the earth, if they be skilfully placed, until they reach the desired location, in which they eagerly repose.