How comes it, you ask me, that you have put the question of 3 earthquakes in the division under which you are going to treat of thunder and lightning? For that is my plan. Well, the earthquake is due to air, and air is the atmosphere in violent motion. Now, though the air may enter the earth in order to produce earthquakes, the treatment of earthquakes does not fall under geography, but more properly belongs to meteorology, which deals with the sphere to which nature has assigned the atmosphere. I can tell you something that will sound stranger still: I must speak of the earth when dealing with the heavenly bodies. Why? you ask. For this reason: we discuss in 4 their own proper place, as part of geography, the properties of the earth, for example, whether it is broad, projecting unequally in a huge bulge to one side, or whether it all assumes the shape of a ball, gathering up its parts into a globe; whether it binds its waters or is itself bound by them; whether it is an animal or a lifeless mass without feeling, full of air no doubt, but not its own breath. These, and all other questions of the kind, as often as they crop up, will 5 be relegated to geography, and be placed in the lowest category. But when the question comes to be the situation of the earth, the part of the universe in which it has settled, its position with respect to the heavens and heavenly bodies, then the inquiry will take its place in the higher category,[34] and obtain higher rank so to speak. [34] Viz. that of the heavenly bodies which constitute the subject matter of astronomy. II