“Besides this, there is the needle which guides the mariner, and which is itself directed by the star called the tramontane.”[6]
The following metrical translation of a poem by Guido Guinicelli, an Italian priest, 1276, is from the pen of Dr. Park Benjamin, of New York:
In what strange regions ’neath the polar star
May the great hills of massy lodestone rise,
Virtue imparting to the ambient air
To draw the stubborn iron; while afar
From that same stone, the hidden virtue flies
To turn the quivering needle to the Bear
In splendor blazing in the Northern skies.
The above extracts show that the directive property of the magnetic needle was well known in England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy in the thirteenth century. In the passage from Neckam, the acum jaculo superpositam has been construed by some to mean a form of pivoted needle, while in the letter of Peregrinus, 1269, the double pivoted form is clearly described.