ricardienne | "the loadstone has a wonderful power of attracting iron"

I'm still not feeling wholly better, but, having fulfilled my obligation, I am at least not trying to write in French.

Luis cornered me this morning and exacted promise that I will go to French Table next week, and that he will be taking attendance. And then it turned out that the rehearsal that I had been told started at 9:00 wasn't actually until 9:30. No Comment, but I could have had a whole extra half hour to drink my tea and read the paper.

I was reading Augustine the other day. Between Tacitus, Canterbury Tales, and The King's Two Bodies, I had been neglecting him of late. I probably shouldn't find his excursions into natural history as funny as I do, but, well, they are funny.

City of God,, Book XI, ch. 4

For who but God the Creator of all things has given to the flesh of the peacock its antiseptic property? This property, when I first heard of it, seemed to me incredible; but it happened at Carthage that a bird of this kind was cooked and served up to me, and, taking a suitable slice of flesh from its breast, I ordered it to be kept, and when it had been kept as many days as make any other flesh stinking, it was produced and set before me, and emitted no offensive smell. And after it had been laid by for thirty days and more, it was still in the same state; and a year after, the same still, except that it was a little more shrivelled, and drier.

Of course, the Aberdeen Bestiary corroborates this: "Its flesh is so hard that it hardly decays and it cannot easily be cooked." But where are they getting this from? If they cook and eat peacocks, well, not regularly, but on occasion, shouldn't someone have had a better idea of what the flesh was like. The most interesting thing is that Augustine claims to be speaking from experience. Assuming he isn't totally making it up, I suppose it might have had something to do with the way it was prepared. Or, as Carthage, I am guessing, is fairly dry, it might have quickly turned into Peacock jerky.

And this is clearly an early version of the "but how do it know" joke:
Who gave to straw such power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it ripens green fruit?

The diamond is a stone possessed by many among ourselves, especially by jewellers and lapidaries, and the stone is so hard that it can be wrought neither by iron nor fire, nor, they say, by anything at all except goat's blood.

Again -- isn't this something that would have been testable?

And then there is a very cool description of the wonderful properties of that strange object the magnet, which I am putting under a cut because it is rather long:

We know that the loadstone has a wonderful power of attracting iron. When I first saw it I was thunderstruck, for I saw an iron ring attracted and suspended by the stone; and then, as if it had communicated its own property to the iron it attracted, and had made it a substance like itself, this ring was put near another, and lifted it up; and as the first ring clung to the magnet, so did the second ring to the first. A third and a fourth were similarly added, so that there hung from the stone a kind of chain of rings, with their hoops connected, not interlinking, but attached together by their outer surface. Who would not be amazed at this virtue of the stone, subsisting as it does not only in itself, but transmitted through so many suspended rings, and binding them together by invisible links? Yet far more astonishing is what I heard about this stone from my brother in the episcopate, Severus bishop of Milevis. He told me that Bathanarius, once count of Africa, when the bishop was dining with him, produced a magnet, and held it under a silver plate on which he placed a bit of iron; then as he moved his hand with the magnet underneath the plate, the iron upon the plate moved about accordingly. The intervening silver was not affected at all, but precisely as the magnet was moved backwards and forwards below it, no matter how quickly, so was the iron attracted above. I have related what I myself have witnessed; I have related what I was told by one whom I trust as I trust my own eyes. Let me further say what I have read about this magnet. When a diamond is laid near it, it does not lift iron; or if it has already lifted it, as soon as the diamond approaches, it drops it. These stones come from India. But if we cease to admire them because they are now familiar, how much less must they admire them who procure them very easily and send them to us?

I am also pleased by the mention of Severus of Milevis, who was a very good friend of Augustine's.