De Magnetica [...] Plantarum p. 640

and say that the lamb feeds on herbs drawn to it by some magnetic or electric force, and that once it has consumed them all it dies. I wonder that many people, while they have to hand domestic and familiar causes, pursue far-fetched, exotic and no less than doubtful ones: for no other different magnetism should be invented here than that by which particular plants are drawn by a natural appetite toward the nourishment due to their nature (which they take in through their roots and stem). While the surrounding herbs are gradually reduced, it should not be thought that this vegetable lamb consumes them by some occult traction: but it draws in all the surrounding moisture, of which it has a very forceful need, through its stalk (just as dodder and ivy by some tyrannical invasion usurp for themselves the moisture owed to other trees), whereof since the neighbouring plants are deprived, it is inevitable that they die along with the lamb. I wanted to add this here so I would not seem to have omitted anything relevant to our magnetic art. I could at this point have brought in any amount of this stuff: but nobody who has well understood the above will be able to give any credit to the efforts of others.

CHAPTER IV.

Anthomagnetisus,

or

On heliotropic plants and their magnetic faculty.

Among the other plants which seem empowered with exceptional magnetism, the crown deservedly goes to those plants which, from the motion with which they follow the sun, are called by the Greeks 'heliotropa', that is 'sunfollowers'. And though it is a property of nearly all flowers to enjoy light and sun, yet in some this marriage of nature is much more evident: for all flowers of plants which, by a proliferation of golden petals spread out into an orb, imitate closely the disc of the radiant sun, like Goatsbeard, Cyclamen, Chameleon [Camomile?], Chrysanthemum, Lupinus [Hop? (Humulus lupulus)], all species of Chicory, Tulips, Persian Lily [Fritillaria persica], Anemone, Scorpion's Tail, Heliotrope properly so called, Acacia, Lotus, and countless others endowed with this power of rotation, are found to have some sort of affinity with the sun; Lupinus, Chicory and Convolvulus seek the sun so eagerly that, from their constant orbital motion according to the motion of the sun, they have earned the name of Peasants' Clocks. Heliotrope, Scorpion's Tail and Persian Lily so tenaciously