While my contemporaries were touching
needles and raising weights, or busying themselves
with inclination and variation, I have been
examining those qualities of magnetism which may be
applied to the accommodation and happiness of common
life. I have left to inferior understandings the
care of conducting the sailor through the hazards of
the ocean, and reserve to myself the more difficult
and illustrious province of preserving the connubial
compact from violation, and setting mankind free for
ever from the danger of suppositious children, and the
torment of fruitless vigilance and anxious suspicion.
To defraud any man of his due praise is unworthy
of a philosopher; I shall therefore openly confess,
that I owe the first hint of this inestimable secret
to the Rabbi Abraham Ben Hannase, who, in his
treatise of precious stones, has left this account of
the magnet:
, &c. "The calamita, or
loadstone that attracts iron, produces many bad
fantasies in man. Women fly from this stone. If
therefore any husband be disturbed with jealousy, and fear
lest his wife converses with other men, let him lay
this stone upon her while she is asleep.
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