For indeed dark and shady things, encompassed with others that are bright and shining, sink underneath and reciprocally rise again, being repelled by them; and in a word, they are so interlaced one within another, that they represent the figure of a face painted to the life; and there seems to have been great probability in that which was spoken against your Clearchus, my dear Aristotle. For he appears not inconveniently to be called yours, for he was intimately acquainted with the ancient Aristotle, although he perverted many of the Peripatetic doctrines. 3. Then Apollonides taking up the discourse, and asking what that opinion of Clearchus was; It would more, said I, beseem any man than you to be ignorant of this discourse, as being grounded on the very fundamental principles of geometry. For he affirms, that what we call a face, is the image and figure of the great ocean, represented in the moon as in a mirror. For the circumference of a circle, when it is reflected back,[95] is wont in many places to touch objects which are not seen in a direct line. And the full moon is for evenness and lustre the most beautiful and purest of all mirrors. As then you hold, that the heavenly bow appears, when the ray of light is reflected back towards the sun, in a cloud which has got a little liquid smoothness and consistence; so, said he, there is seen in the moon the surface of the sea, not in the place where it is situated, but from whence the reflection gives a sight of it by its reverberated and reflexed light, as Agesianax again says in another passage, This flaming mirror offers to your eyes The vast sea’s figure, as beneath it lies Foaming with raging billows. 4. Apollonides therefore, being delighted with this, said: A singular opinion indeed is this of his, and (to speak in a word) strangely and newly invented by a man sufficiently presumptuous, but not void of learning and wit. But how, I pray, was it refuted?