THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB.
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Monument to Dr. Gilberd in Holy Trinity Church, Colchester.
Gilberd enjoyed a high reputation as a philosopher among his contemporaries
and immediate successors in the world of science, and in the estimation of those
best able to judge, he is entitled to hold a place in the very front rank of Nature's
explorers. Dr. Munk repeats a statement that it was by a perusal of "De
Magnete "that Galileo was induced to turn his mind to magnetism. Certain it is
that the great Italian highly appreciated him ; "I extremely admire and envy,''
he wrote, "the author of 'De Magnete.' I think him worthy of the greatest
praise for the many new and true observations which he has made, to the disgrace
of so many vain and fabling authors ; who write not from their own knowledge
only, but repeat everything they hear from the foolish and vulgar, without
attempting to satisfy themselves of the same by experience."
Even Bacon, jealous as he seems to have been of another's merit, could not
help according a word of praise ; and although he somewhat sneeringly wrote
that, like as the alchemists from a few experiments of the furnace, Gilberd had
made a philosophy out of a loadstone, yet he admitted the "De Magnete" to be a
"painfull experimental booke." But while the one philosopher speculated the other
worked; and many years before the publication of the "Novum Organum"
Gilberd was practising in his quiet house in London those methods of experi-
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