Possibly, However, The Plant
Ptolemy Meant May Not Have Been The Plant We Now Call Garlic, For There
Is Nothing So Uncertain As The Names Of Plants.
There is a great
confusion, and it is difficult to identify with certainty apparently
well-known herbs with those used by the ancients.
Possibly, too, the
experiment was performed in a different manner. It happened one day, many
years after reading this, I chanced to be talking to a village clockmaker
about watches. We were discussing what a difficulty it was sometimes to
get a watch to go right. I said I had heard that watches sometimes got
magnetised, and went on in the most erratic manner until the magnetism
was counteracted. Ah yes, he said, he recollected a case in the shop
where he learnt his trade; they had a watch brought to them which had got
magnetised, and he believed the influence was at last removed by the use
of onions. Instantly memory ran back to Ptolemy's garlic; perhaps after
all there was something in his statement; at all events, it is very
curious that the subject should come up again in this unexpected way, in
the darkness, as it were, of a village where the very name of the great
mathematician was unknown. The clockmaker fumbled with an anecdote, and
tried to tell me of another sort of magnetism which had got into a watch.
The watch would not keep time, nothing would make it; till by-and-by it
occurred to him to suggest to the owner to wind it up at breakfast-time
instead of at night.
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