"I’m afraid our speaker tonight, Robert Smith, has had to pull out due to ill health. I have not been able to get a replacement speaker to do a similar talk, but do not want to cancel altogether, because some people may turn up having seen a poster, or the website, or out of habit etc. So Jim will give a talk entitled “A Brief History of Magnetism” which I gave at a conference three years ago. It was originally designed for physics students, but I can skip the boring bits. The talk will concentrate on developments in the science of magnetism from approximately the mid-18th century to the mid-19th, and will hopefully include a few surprises."