Even as late as 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Vienna found that all had transferred their superstitions from religion to chemistry; "scarcely a man of opulence or fashion that has not an alchemist in his service." To one scientific man of the period I must refer as the author of the first scientific book published in England.

Dryden sings: Gilbert shall live till load-stones cease to draw Or British fleets the boundless ocean awe.
And the verse is true, for by the publication in 1600 of the "De Magnete" the science of electricity was founded.

William Gilbert was a fine type of the sixteenth-century physician, a Colchester man, educated at St.John's College, Cambridge.

Silvanus Thompson says: "He is beyond question rightfully regarded as the Father of Electric Science.

He founded the entire subject of Terrestrial Magnetism.