Translation of Otto von Guericke's Experimenta Nova, Bk. IV, Ch. 15
The following is my translation of Otto von Guericke's Experimenta Nova (1672), book IV, chapter 15, wherein he describes his famed "electrostatic generator," a globe made of solid sulfur. Guericke was a fairly acute philosopher, but was still more in the tradition of sympathies and antipathies, rather than the burgeoning rationalism of Bacon, Descartes, Huygens, Leibniz, and Newton. He developed a concept of mundane virtues which was his proposed model of the universe and nature. It was with this in mind, and certainly not electricity, that Guericke developed his sulfur globe experiment. With its "conservative virtue", the sulfur globe is able to draw bits of paper, or soft feathers, and he even develops a few experiments to demonstrate electric repulsion and conduction. These were not recognized by him, and in fact it's not clear whether he understood the phenomena to be electric in nature. He was familiar with Kircher and Gilbert and other authors, who