Stones

A little bending of the rules. Some of my day was occupied with stones, but this picture of a much more intriguing stone was taken yesterday. I've been for one of those ultrasound with added jelly things but, because I'm definitely not pregnant, I didn't get given a picture. It turns out that I've probably had stones in the past in various bits of my insides where stones may be secreted, but I probably haven't got any now. So that's alright then, probably

This is 'The Countess of Westmorland’s Loadstone'. It's in the very odd Oxford History of Science Museum - the sort of old-school museum where too many exhibits are crammed into ill-lit glass cases and inadequately labelled in a typeface that is too small to easily read. It actually has some fascinating historical scientific instruments from the dawn or Renaissance science, and from the Islamic world, but the complexity of each one, and trying to understand exactly what they were for rapudly becomes overwhelming. There are some early surgical instruments that make you glad to be born in the 20th century

The label on this exhibit left me confused, and this more extended description still leaves questions unanswered. A loadstone (or lodestone) is an extremely rare form of the fairly common mineral, magetite - one of the many compounds of iron and oxygen. It is magnetic; shaped slivers of it can therefore be used as a compass - as the Chinese were doing 1,000 years ago. There is no certainty about how it is created: the only real theory is that it is the effect of lightening on the unmagnetised form, in certain circumstances. This starts to smell of ancient magik and alchemy; coded texts on dusty rolled parchment; eccentric explorers in uncharted mountain-territory, visiting gothic castles on dark winter nights 

I still do not really undertand what this apparatus is supposed to demonstrate. "The stone as displayed is capable of supporting a weight of 160 lbs" (that's 72.5kg), says the text I have linked, and so did the label. I suppose it means that the magnetic power of the stone is supporting that weight in some way. Is that a lot? It seems so to me. Is this a particularly big stone, or particularly powerful? Loadstones are not so named because they can carry a load, but because the word 'lode' once meant a journey, or the way. A lodestone compass can show you the way

From the description in the link, The Countess sounds like a no nonsense sort of woman, who would have given me straight answers. Sadly, she is not around, and stones leave unanswered questions