CHAPTER XIII. HISTORICAL SKETCH. 215. Divers claims regarding the invention of the Compass. Almost every country, ancient and medieval, has laid claim to the Compass as its own invention; to search out the evidence and facts of each-to confront them one with another and thrash out the few grains of truth that lie hidden in a stack of legendary chaff, is a task that does not enter into the plan of this work: it has been done by various writers, but with a result nearly always tinged with the bias of the author. With this one, the Chinese were the inventors; with another, the Northmen; with a third, the Italians; and with still more, the Arabs and the French. The truth is, that research, so far, has not indisputably established the fact when and where a magnetic needle first guided a ship. The development of the compass was very slow, and indeed it is only within the last fifty years that such improvement has been made as to entitle it to entire confidence. Between the piece of steel of the twelfth century that was temporarily rubbed with a lodestone and set upon a float in water, and the refined compass of to-day-almost worthy of place among the instruments of precision—there is a gulf so wide and deep, that one can scarcely recognize in the former the prototype of the latter. Such probable links, however, in the lineage as have |