The first observation of magnetic declination on land appears to have been made about the year 1510 by George Hartmann (1489-1564), Vicar of the Church of St. Sebald in Nuremberg, who found it to be 6° east in Rome, where he was living at the time. Hartmann's observation of the declination in Rome and also in Nuremberg, where the needle pointed 10° east of north, will be found in a letter which he wrote in 1544 to Duke Albert of Prussia and which remained unpublished until the year 1831.
Returning to the treatise of Peregrinus on the magnet, it should be said that for several centuries the twenty-eight manuscript copies lay undisturbed on the dusty shelves of city and university libraries. In 1562, four years after the appearance of the first printed edition (Augsburg, 1558), Taisnier, a Belgian writer on magnetics, who is also described as poet-laureate and Doctor "utriusque juris," was among the earliest to discover the "Epistola," from which he copied extensively in his little quarto on the magnet and its effects, thus showing that there were literary pirates in those days. It was also well known to Gilbert, to Cabeo and Kircher; but despite the references of these writers, the "Epistola" remained practically unknown until Cavallo, of London, called attention to the Leyden manuscript in the third edition of his "Treatise on Magnetism,"[5] 1800, by giving part of the text and accompanying it with a translation.
Later, in 1838, Libri, historian of the mathematical sciences in Italy, gave excerpts from the Paris codex with translation; but the scholar who contributed most of all to make the work of Peregrinus known is the Italian Barnabite, Timoteo Bertelli, who published in 1868 a critical study of the various manuscripts of the letter, principally those which he found in Rome and in Florence, adding copious notes of historic, bibliographic and scientific value. Father Bertelli was Professor of Physics in the Collegio della Quercia, in Florence, where he took an active interest in Italian seismology besides carrying on investigations in meteorology, telegraphy and electricity. Born in Bologna in 1826, he died in Florence in March, 1905.
The following list of manuscript copies of the "Epistola" is taken from a scholarly paper by Professor Silvanus P. Thompson, of London, which appeared in the "Proceedings of the British Academy" for 1906:—
| The Bodleian Library | seven |
| Vatican | four |
| British Museum | one |
| Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris | two |
| Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence | one |
| Trinity College, Dublin | one |
| Gonville and Caius, Cambridge | one |
| The University of Leyden | one |
| Geneva | one |
| Turin | one |
| Erfurt | three |
| Vienna | three |
| S. P. Thompson | two |
The first printed edition of the "Epistola" was prepared for the press in 1558 by Achilles Gasser, a man well versed in the science and philosophy of his day; another edition, which will probably be considered the textus receptus, is that which was prepared and published by Bertelli in 1868.
No complete translation in any language of this historical work on magnetism was made until 1902, when Prof. Silvanus P. Thompson, of London, published his "Epistle of Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt to Sygerus of Foncaucourt, soldier, concerning the Magnet." Unfortunately, this translation was printed for private circulation and limited to 250 copies. Two years later, 1904, Brother Arnold, F. S. C., presented a memoir on Peregrinus, including a translation of the "Epistola," for the M. Sc. degree of Manhattan College, New York City, which translation was published some months later by the McGraw Publishing Company, New York. These are the only complete translations of the "Letter" of Peregrinus on the Magnet which have yet appeared.
Brother Potamian.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Klaproth, "Lettre à M. le Baron A. de Humbolt sur l'Invention de la Boussole." 1834; also Encyc. Brit., article Compass.