De Magnetica Plantarum

The Fifth Part of The Third Book of The Magnetic World Phytomagnetism or On the Magnetic Power of Plants.

That there is the greatest affinity between plants and the workings of Lodestone is clearly obvious from the fact that they imitate perfectly the motion of lodestone; Lodestone has three different motions; the first motion of lodestone is that whereby, following certain fibres of its body extended and coordinated from pole to pole, it propagates its magnetic force, so to speak, along its length. The second is that of radiation, whereby with rays diffused from each pole it establishes the effective sphere of its activity, within which it moves and attracts any body that is constituted similarly to itself. The third is that of disposition, by which it places itself along the axis of the world, or the terrestrial globe, as its preserving principle; so that if ever it has been forcibly removed from this orientation, it accommodates itself back to it by a circular motion and there it rests as being the place most agreeable to its nature. I find the same number of different motions in most plants: the first is vegetative, whereby the plant by vegetal force propagates itself directly up toward the vertical by means of shoots and stems; the second is the motion in which the properties vested in plants diffuse themselves within an orbit: the third is the positional motion of certain plants whereby they accommodate themselves to a certain place and orientation, or turn toward the sun and moon as if to their preserving principle, adopting a circular motion. Each of these must be addressed individually.

CHAPTER I.

The vegetative motion of plants.

Since individual things brought into this theatre of the world consist of separate parts, and a wide variety of faculties, and other assistances assigned by nature's providence, two additional things were seen to be required for their comfortable

survival: the first is that the parts be correctly attached to each other, and that the individual limbs of the body be arranged in order, namely that the head should be supported by the neck, the neck by the chest, the chest by the legs, like columns sustaining the mass of the whole edifice. The second is that the whole assemblage of such an edifice should stand erect, built in an orderly relationship to the universe, with the head pointing up and the feet down; if this were done differently, and the body were inverted, or inclined outside the directional line, it would necessarily suffer the greatest violence as a result of this position most contrary to its nature. All of which applies to all of the many things that have been produced. Accordingly, as profusely explained in the preceding pages, the elements so studiously observe the arrangement of their position that it is easier for the world to slip than for them undergo the violence of a contrary position. Hence fire and air, if enclosed in the earth, break, split and scatter everything so they may enjoy the free range of their own domain. Hence, since the heavy cannot coexist with the light, floods, ruination, and the burying of cities and whole provinces, must inevitably be caused by the impulse of weight tending to its natural place and centre. Thus individual minerals keep to their particular and appropriate seats on earth, so that if removed from them they immediately perish; hence some prefer their individual lodgings dry, some damp, some hot, and the rest cold; hence lead, subjected to constant salt water, is dissolved into quicksilver; iron mines too, under the tyranny of water, disappear into red liquid; but to return to where we began, this natural appetite is moreover seen very much both in lodestone and in plants and fruits; so, just as lodestone has two ends, North and South, it seems necessary to its survival that the parts, or fibres tending towards it ends should not only be well arranged in respect to each other and hold their due position along the length, but also that they should have a suitable position with respect to the universe, for otherwise they cannot comfortably preserve themselves; and thus a plant too requires not only that the trunk be placed over the roots, and upright, so it can luxuriate in branches and side-shoots, but also, to preserve its vigour, it is necessary that the root be buried in the ground and the stem turn upward. But just as the force of lodestone is propagated lengthwise by certain fibres, so vegetal things also have certain fibres, or pores, through which they may communicate to their individual parts the nutriment they have consumed.

Experiment I.

Let any tree be selected in a flat, open piece of ground, well away from walls, such that the tree be always freely lit and warmed by the sun; let its trunk or stem be smooth and straight, like that of plums or pines or other trees; then let this trunk be cut, with a cut parallel to the horizon, and let the lower part of the trunk remain upright in its natural state; now let the surface of this cut tree be freed from roughness, planed flat and very well sanded; before long there will appear on that flat surface many circles, which will in fact be eccentric, that is, not set around the same centre, but on one side closer, on the other side looser. It has been established by persistent observation that the part (let us call it A) which has denser circles faces North, while that with more widely spaced ones (say B) faces South. If you divide the whole trunk with parallel cuts into 6, 7, 8 or 10 parts, each and every part will return the same circles; which is a clear sign that these are like fibres or veins of the vegetal body, drawn out lengthwise cylindrically, through which the tree lives on nourishment consumed, and is sustained; but this is clear: there is one thing that could rightly cause puzzlement, namely why, just like lodestone, these circles should have any such evident regard, in their density and rarity, to the Northern and Southern regions, such that they could indicate almost exactly the meridian BA and the other regions of the world; I say then that this drawing out and contraction of the circles does not come about in the same way by which the lodestone extends its fibres, from some innate appetite for accommodating itself to the line of the world's axis, as many think after seeing this result; but I demonstrate as follows that it is caused by the motion of the sun passing around the tree: let the trunk of the tree be ABCD, and let point A refer to the North, B the South, D the East and C the West; as the sun continually illuminates and warms the outer surface of the tree, this makes the moisture, attracted from the roots and rarefied through these columnar tubes, dilate the part of the tree DBC, and hence the circles too are drawn into looser arcs. But the part DAC, since it nearly always has its face turned away from the sun, like one deprived of heat, is constrained and condensed, and so the circles too

come out more contracted. When I first learned of this experiment from the accounts of others, I neglected no act which might enable me to penetrate more deeply these very rich gifts of nature; so having inspected all the cabinetmakers' workshops, which I knew to be full of a variety of timbers, I arranged for different woods to be cut up by the parallel method so I could contemplate this arboreal palmistry more extensively; and in ebony, as figure 1 shows, I found the circles completely concentric, as also in Brazilwood; but in our native timbers, as in fig. 2, I found that nature had drawn something you might call elliptical, parabolical or hyperbolical; such, in any case, that in some places the ellipses of this sort might be looser, in others tighter. But other timbers assumed an irregular and angular pattern, as in figures 3 and 4. The cause of this diversity, despite my many enquiries, was not forthcoming; however, it came about that when the following autumn I went to the Subiaco region to visit the birthplace of Holy Benedict for religious reasons, I saw in a particular valley certain felled trees, and took the opportunity to have one of their trunks planed for me. When I discovered that it was afflicted with irregular veins I was extremely surprised, especially since in a felled tree of the same species on a flat area of a nearby mountain I had found on close inspection that the trunk was patterned elliptical and round; but the fibres of the tree cut in the valley were, as figure 2 shows, narrowed on both sides toward the North and the South, while toward the east and west they were broadened: I now realised that the reason for this was, that this valley, running from east to west, was stretched out beneath a mountain which was interposed to the south in such a way that, for a great part of the year, the rays both of the rising and of the setting sun had access to the valley. But in the noonday direction, for a great part of the year, the mountain by its shadow completely eliminated any gaze of the benign light upon trees positioned in the valley; from this I concluded that the fibres of this tree were drawn into this pattern according to the rays of the sun, which constantly had access from the east and west, so that

the looser parts faced east and west, but the tighter ones faced south and north. But on the surface of the tree cut on the mountain the stem had grown with its fibres elliptical and more or less round, because it had always been lit and warmed by the sun from the south. And going on from this, I saw at last the reason why Ebony and Indian wood grow with concentric fibres: for since such timbers mostly occur in the torrid zone, and hence are warmed throughout the whole year by the attention of the sun, there was no reason why they should be constricted or dilated on one side rather than another, and consequently in the torrid zone they grow concentric fibres; although elliptical fibres can be caused by the positioning of mountains even in that zone; but in the temperate zone they take on an elliptical pattern, both from the oblique aspect of the sun and from the sun's unequal height and the variation in daylength; so you see how nature may play in all things, how everything may be mirrored in everything, and how, after the example and ideas of the principal causes from which they are produced, they may display circles, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas? Certainly an infinity, known to nobody, of such things are contained in nature's ambit, and if they were by constant observation to be discovered, surely nothing in nature's theatre could be hidden from us. But let us return to our business.

Just as lodestone has by its nature a certain set line and quality of force, by which it achieves its assigned position and orientation, in the same way plants, shrubs and trees too have their pores so arranged and drawn out lengthwise in a set way that, if wood had the power of locating itself freely, it would seek out its own natural orientation according to the disposition of its pores, by some innate appetite for facing up and down in due order towards the vertical point, called the Zenith, and the opposite, the nadir, since this orientation would lead it to a longer and happier life. Hence even if a tree's branches are pressed down by some weight, yet so powerful is the desire to elevate itself that, even by restoring the vigorous state of orientation of the suckers and sideshoots which subsequently burst from it as the stem grows out, it raises itself up as though by a vicarious effort. Indeed so much do plants delight in this uprightness that those to which nature has denied stalks and stems, and other more rigid means for staying upright, are found, by means of tendrils and holdfasts like so many hands, to cling on to supports and stakes, with the help of which they may be raised up. It accordingly happens, because through the cylindriform arrangement of such pores in fruits and trees the nourishment of the whole tree is transported to the remaining parts of the tree, that plants observe this arrangement of the pores, tight here and loose there,