"The year 1600 was the first in which England produced a remarkable work in physical science; but this was one sufficient to raise a lasting reputation to its author. Gilbert, a physician, in his Latin treatise on the magnet, not only collected all the knowledge which others had possessed on that subject, but became at once the father of experimental philosophy in this island, and by a singular felicity and acuteness of genius, the founder of theories which have been revived after the lapse of ages, and are almost universally received into the creed of the science. The magnetism of the earth itself, his own original hypothesis... was by no means one of those vague conjectures... He relied on the analogy of terrestrial phenomena to those exhibited by what he calls a terrella, or artificial spherical magnet. ...Gilbert was also one of our earliest Copernicans, at least as to the rotation of the earth; and with his usual sagacity inferred, before the invention of the telescope, that there are a multitude of fixed stars beyond the reach of our vision."
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Philosophers from EnglandCosmologistsAstronomers from EnglandPhysicists from EnglandPhysicians from England
Original Language: English
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Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries (1848) Vol.2 pp.232-3.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gilbert_(astronomer)
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William Gilbert (astronomer)
William Gilbert (24 May, 1544 – 30 November, 1603) was an English natural philosopher and royal physician to England's Elizabeth I and to James VI and I. He studied the earth's magnetism and properties of the compass, such as magnetic dip, using the model of a terrella. He is highly regarded for original experiments in electricity and magnetism and for his advocacy of the experimental method. He preceded Francis Bacon in his opposition to the methods of Scholasticism with its emphasis on dialect
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