Some have asked, as already pointed out, whether the southern hemisphere be not all water, forming, as it were, a great part of the ocean, so as to leave but little of the surface of the earth in it uncovered. The reply to this is, that, according to what we are taught by sacred writ and by philosophical reasoning, there is proportionably as great a surface of land uncovered in the southern hemisphere as in the northern. For the fiat of the Creator, that the waters should be collected into certain hollows of the earth, in order that there should remain uncovered the portion that was necessary for the production of vegetation, as where He says in Genesis the 1st: “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear,” supposes this water to have been created an entire orb, which covered and surrounded the whole of the earth, in the same manner as we reckon the positions of the elements; the land the lowest, in the middle of which is the centre of the whole elementary and celestial machine, then the water, and after that the air and igneous substance or the fire, which reaches its culmination or convex part in the concave of the celestial firmament. Then if, when God commanded that the waters should be gathered together, it was to be understood solely with reference to the northern hemisphere, the water in the southern hemisphere would remain as it was, surrounding and covering all, and the whole sphere of water could not be contained beneath one spherical surface equidistant to the centre of gravity, which always seeks to be united with the centre of the whole machine. And thus all the water of the southern hemisphere would be more remote from the said centre than that of the other hemisphere, without being contained in any sinus, and thus would be much higher, and naturally could not contain itself without flowing towards the other hemisphere, until it placed itself in equilibrium with the said centre of gravity; as is plainly gathered from the demonstration of Archimedes, in his work “De Insidentibus Aquæ,” and is manifestly seen in the ebb and flow of the ocean; in which it is observed, that when the water rises above the surface of equidistance from its centre of gravity, it immediately outflows its ordinary limits until it finds its level with that surface; so that the gathering together of the waters was proportional in the two halves of the sphere of earth and water, gathering itself into certain hollows of the earth, which also have their means of correspondence between the two hemispheres. For as the quiet and equilibrium of the parts of the earth and water with respect to the centre of gravity consist in the equal tendencies of the opposite parts towards the same centre, it follows that the sinuses or receptacles of water in the one half are nearly proportioned in their position and other respects to those of the other. From all which it follows, that in the southern hemisphere there is an