Leithead tells us that streams of fire came from the hair of Servius Tullius, a Roman King, during sleep, when he was about seven years of age (Dionysius, “Antiq. Rom.” lib. iv.; Pliny, “Hist. Nat.” lib. ii. cap. 37); that Cardan alludes to the hair of a certain Carmelite monk emitting sparks whenever it was rubbed backward (“De Rerum Varietate,” lib. viii. cap. 43); that Father Faber, in his “Palladium Chemicum,” speaks of a young woman whose hair emitted sparks while being combed, and also refers to allusions made in the same line by Thomas Bartholinus, “De Luce Animalium,” Lugd. 1647, p. 121; Ezekiel di Castro, “De Igne Lambente”; Johann Jacob Hemmer, “Trans. Elec. Soc. Mannheim,” Vol. VI; and Phil. Trans., Vol. V. pp. 1, 40.
References.—Eustath in Iliad, E. p. 515, ed. Rom.; “Encycl. Brit.,” 1855, VIII. p. 571; Priestley, “History of Electricity,” London, 1775, pp. 128, 129; Phil. Trans., abridged, Vol. X. pp. 278, 343, 344, 357.
A.D. 1190–1210.—Guyot de Provins, minstrel at the Court of the Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa), gives the first French mention of the water compass in a manuscript “politico-satirical” poem entitled “La Bible,” to be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is therein said that sailors were at that time in the habit of rubbing needles upon the ugly brown stone called marinière, “to which iron adheres of its own accord,” and that, as soon as placed afloat upon a small piece of straw in the water, the needles would point to the North. The passage alluding to the compass has been copied by D. A. Azuni, member of the Turin Academy of Sciences, from the original manuscript, and is given entire, with the French translation, at p. 137 of his “Dissertation ...” second edition, Paris, 1809:
“De notre père l’apostoile (le pape)
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Ils l’appellent la tresmontaigne
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Par la vertu de la marinière,
Une pierre laide et brumière,
Ou li fers volontiers se joint....”