A portrait of Gilbert was preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for many years; but has long since disappeared from its walls. On the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary (1903) of Gilbert's death, a fine painting representing the Doctor in the act of showing some of his electrical experiments to Queen Elizabeth and her court (including Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake and Cecil, Lord Burleigh, famous Secretary of State), was presented to the Mayor of Colchester by the London Institute of Electrical Engineers. A replica of the painting was sent to the St. Louis Exposition, 1904, where it formed one of the attractions of the Electricity Building.
The house in which Gilbert was born (1544) still stands in Holy Trinity Street, Colchester, where it is frequently visited by persons interested in the history of electric and magnetic science.
Brother Potamian.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] "Souvenir of Gilberd's Tercentenary," p. 6.
[7] See magnetic myths, page 5.
[CHAPTER III.]
Franklin and Some Contemporaries.
As already seen, the writers of Greece and Rome knew little about the lodestone; we have now to add that the knowledge of electricity which they possessed was of the same elementary character. They knew that certain resinous substances, such as amber and jet had, when rubbed, the property of attracting straws, feathers, dry leaves and other light bodies; beyond this, their philosophy did not go. The Middle Ages added little to the subject, as the Schoolmen were occupied with questions of a higher order. The Saxon Heptarchy came and went, Alcuin taught in the schools of Charlemagne, Cardinal Langton compelled a landless and worthless king to sign Magna Charta, universities were founded with Papal sanction in Italy, France, Germany, England and Scotland, Copernicus wrote his treatise on the revolution of heavenly bodies and dedicated it to Pope Paul III., Tycho Brahé made his famous astronomical observations at Uranienborg and befriended at Prague the penniless Kepler, and Columbus gave a New World to Castile and Leon—all this before the man appeared who, using amber as guide, discovered a new world of phenomena, of thought and philosophy. This man was no other that Gilbert, whose discoveries in magnetism were described in an earlier chapter. The trunk line of his work was magnetism; electricity was only a siding. One was the main subject of a life-long quest while the other was only a digression. It was a digression in which the qualities of the native-born investigator are seen at their very best: alertness and earnestness, resourcefulness and perseverance, all rewarded by a rich harvest of valuable results. It is refreshing and inspiring to read the Second Book of Gilbert's treatise, De Magnete, in which are recorded in quick succession the twenty important discoveries which he made in his new field of labor.