by William Gilbert, On the Magnet — Book IV. Chap. 11… (1900)
“ Cardan's error when he seeks the distance of the centre of the earth from the centre of the cosmos by the motion of the stone of Hercules; in his book 5, On Proportions. ne may very easily fall into mistakes and errors when one is searching into the hidden causes of things, in the absence of real experiments, and this is easily apparent from the crass error of Cardan; who deems himself to have discovered the distances of the centres of the cosmos and of the earth through a variation of the magnetick iron of 9 degrees. ”
