already thickly inhabited?
A late writer, speaking upon the subject of the loadstone, tells us:
"Hercules, it was said, being once overpowered by the heat of the sun,
drew his bow against that luminary; whereupon the god Phoebus, admiring
his intrepidity, gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed over the
ocean. This cup was the compass, which old writers have called Lapis
Heracleus. Pisander says Oceanus lent him the cup, and Lucian says it
was a sea-shell. Tradition affirms that the magnet originally was not on
a pivot, but set to float on water in a cup. The old antiquarian is
wildly theoretical on this point, and sees a compass in the Golden
Fleece of Argos, in the oracular needle which Nero worshipped, and in
everything else. Yet undoubtedly there are some curious facts connected
with the matter. Osonius says that Gama and the Portuguese got the
compass from some pirates at the Cape of Good Hope, A.D. 1260. M.
Fauchet, the French antiquarian, finds it plainly alluded to in some old
poem of Brittany belonging to the year A.D. 1180. Paulo Venetus brought
it in the thirteenth century from China, where it was regarded as
oracular.
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