With bitter med’cines bitter choler purge. And Theon having answered me that it was Sophocles; This, said I to him, we must of necessity permit them to do; but we are not to give ear to those philosophers who would overthrow paradoxes by assertions no less strange and paradoxical, and for the oppugning strange and extravagant opinions, devise others yet more wonderful and absurd; as these men do, who broach and introduce this doctrine of a motion tending towards the middle, in which what sort of absurdity is there not to be found? Does it not thence follow, that the earth is spherical, though we nevertheless see it to have so many lofty hills, so many deep valleys, and so great a number of inequalities? Does it not follow that there are antipodes dwelling opposite to another, sticking on every side to the earth, with their heads downwards and their heels upwards, as if they were woodworms or lizards? That we ourselves go not on the earth straight upright, but obliquely and bending aside like drunken men? That if bars and weights of a thousand talents apiece should be let fall into the hollow of the earth, they would, when they were come to the centre, stop and rest there, though nothing came against them or sustained them; and that, if peradventure they should by force pass the middle, they would of themselves return and rebound back thither again? That if one should saw off the two trunks or ends of a beam on either side of the earth, they would not be always carried downwards, but falling both from without into the earth, they would equally meet, and hide themselves together in the middle? That if a violent stream of water should run downwards into the ground, it would, when it came to the centre of the earth, which they hold to be an incorporeal point, there gather together, and turn round like a whirlpool, with a perpetual and endless suspension? Some of which positions are so absurd, that none can so much as force his imagination, though falsely, to conceive them possible. For this is indeed to make that which is above to be below; and to turn all things upside down, by making all that is as far as the middle to be _downwards_, and all that is beyond the middle to be _upwards_; so that if a man should, by the sufferance and consent of the earth, stand with his navel just against her centre, he would by this means have his feet and head both upwards; and if one, having digged through that place which is beyond the middle, should come to pull him out from thence, that part which is below would at one and the same time be drawn upwards, and that which is above, downwards. And if another should be imagined to stand the contrary way, their feet, though the one’s were opposite to the other’s, would both be and be said to be upwards.