Chap. ix.
Iron ore attracts iron ore.

F rom various substances iron (like all the rest of the metals) is extracted: such substances being stones, earth, and similar concretions which miners call veins because it is in veins83, as it were, that they are generated. We have spoken above of the variety of these veins. If a properly coloured ore of iron and a rich one (as miners call it) is placed, as soon as mined, upon water in a bowl or any small vessel (as we have shown before in the case of a loadstone), it is attracted by a similar piece of ore brought near by hand, yet not so powerfully and quickly as one loadstone is drawn by another loadstone, but slowly............