heat and cold, risings and settings, day and night, morn and eve, noon and midnight. Thus the Earth seeks and re-seeks the Sun, turns away from him and pursues him, by her own wondrous magnetick virtue. Besides, it is not only from the Sun that evil would impend, if the Earth were to stay still and be deprived of solar benefit; but from the Moon also serious dangers would threaten. For we see how the ocean rises and swells beneath certain known positions of the Moon: And if there were not through the daily rotation of Earth a speedy transit of the Moon, the flowing sea would be driven above its level into certain regions, and many shores would be overwhelmed with huge waves. In order then that Earth may not perish in various ways, and be brought to confusion, she turns herself about by magnetick and primary virtue: and the like motions exist also in the rest of the Wanderers, urged specially by the movement and light of other bodies. For the Moon also turns herself about in a monthly course, to receive in succession the Sun's beams in which she, like the Earth, {225} rejoices, and is refreshed: nor could she endure them for ever on one particular side without great harm and sure destruction. Thus each one of the moving globes is for its own safety borne in an orbit either in some wider circle, or only by a rotation of its body, or by both together. But it is ridiculous for a man a philosopher to suppose that all the fixed stars and the planets and the still higher heavens revolve to no other purpose, save the advantage of the Earth. It is the Earth, then, that revolves, not the whole heaven, and this motion gives opportunity for the growth and decrease of things, and for the generating of things animate, and awakens internal heat for the bringing of them to birth. Whence matter is quickened for receiving forms; and from the primary rotation of the Earth natural bodies have their primary impetus and original activity. The motion then of the whole Earth is primary, astral, circular, around its own poles, whose verticity arises on both sides from the plane of the æquator, and whose vigour is infused into opposite termini, in order that the Earth may be moved by a sure rotation for its good, the Sun also and the stars helping its motion. But the simple straight motion downwards of the Peripateticks is a motion of weight, a motion of the aggregation of disjoined parts, in the ratio of their matter, along straight lines toward the body of the Earth: which lines tend the shortest way toward the centre. The motions of disjoined magnetical parts of the Earth, besides the motion of aggregation, are coition, revolution, and the direction of the parts to the whole, for harmony of form, and concordancy. * * * * * CHAP. V. Arguments of those denying the Earth's motion, and _their confutation._