In 1269, Pierre de Maricourt (commonly referred to as Petrus Peregrinus) wrote a letter to a friend in which he described two kinds of compass, one in which an oval lodestone floated in a bowl of water, and the first dry compass with the needle mounted on a pivot. He also was the first to write about experiments with magnetism and describe the laws of attraction. An example is the experiment where a magnet is broken into two pieces and the two pieces can attract and repel each other (in modern terms, they both have north and south poles).[7] This letter, generally referred to as Epistola de Magnete, was a landmark in the history of science.[2][3]