Its strange effects, they view with wond’ring eyes
When without aid of hinges, links or springs
A pendant chain we hold of steely rings
Dropt from the stone—the stone the binding source—
Ring cleaves to ring and owns magnetic force:
Those held above, the ones below maintain,
Circle ’neath circle downward draws in vain
Whilst free in air disports the oscillating chain.
The poet Claudian (365-408 A. D.) wrote a short idyll on the attractive virtue of the lodestone and its symbolism; St. Augustine (354-430), in his work De Civitate Dei, records the fact that a lodestone, held under a silver plate, draws after it a scrap of iron lying on the plate. Abbot Neckam, the Augustinian (1157-1217), distinguishes between the properties of the two ends of the lodestone, and gives in his De Utensilibus, what is perhaps the earliest reference to the mariner’s compass that we have. Albertus Magnus, the Dominican (1193-1280), in his treatise, De Mineralibus, enumerates different kinds of natural magnets and states some of the properties commonly attributed to them; the minstrel, Guyot de Provins, in a famous satirical poem, written about 1208, refers to the directive quality of the lodestone and its use in navigation, as do also Cardinal de Vitry in his Historia Orientalis (1215-1220); Brunetto Latini, poet, orator and philosopher, in his Trésor des Sciences, a veritable library, written in Paris in 1260; Raymond Lully, the Enlightened Doctor, in his treatise, De Contemplatione, begun in 1272, and Guido Guinicelli, the poet-priest of Bologna, who died in 1276.
The authors of these learned works were too busy with the pen to find time to devote to the close and prolonged study of natural phenomena necessary for fruitful discovery, and so had to content themselves with recording and discussing in their tomes the scientific knowledge of their age without making any notable additions to it.