where the word for “to owe” imports increase! Again, when [Sidenote: E] he calls night “swift”,[131] you fasten lovingly on the word, and actually say that it implies that the shadow is conical, as thrown by a spherical body. Then Medicine tells us that an abundance of spiders prognosticates a summer of pestilence, and so does a crow’s-foot on the fig leaves in spring. Who is going to allow this, unless he grants that small things may be indications of great ones? Who will endure that the magnitude of the sun should be measured by “half-gallon or half-pint”, or that the acute angle made on the sundial here by the gnomon with the surface should be a measure of the elevation of the [Sidenote: F] visible poles above the horizon? Such, at any rate, were the accounts to be heard from the prophets down there, so that we must have some other answer to give if we wish to keep for the sun his constitutional order without deviation.’ IV. ‘Not for the sun only,’ cried Ammonius the philosopher, who was present, ‘but for the whole heavens! For his passage from solstice to solstice must of necessity be curtailed and not [Sidenote: 411] cover so large a portion of the firmament as mathematicians say, its southern parts constantly shrinking towards the more northerly. Our summer, too, must become shorter, and its temperature colder, as his course curves inwards, and he covers wider parallels among the tropical constellations. Again, the gnomons at Syene must cease to throw no shadow at the summer solstice; many fixed stars would be found to have closed in, some of them touching others and being mingled with them as the interval disappeared. If, on the other hand, they shall [Sidenote: B] assert that the other bodies remain as they are, the sun alone being irregular in his movements, they will be unable to state the cause which accelerates him alone out of so many bodies, and will throw most of the phenomena into confusion, those of the moon entirely, so that there will be no need of measures of oil to prove the difference; eclipses will prove it, when the sun comes into contact with the moon more frequently, and the moon with the earth’s shadow. The rest is clear, and there is no need to unravel any further the imposture of the theory.’ ‘For all that,’ said Cleombrotus, ‘I saw the measures with my own eyes, for they showed me several; that of the current year [Sidenote: C] fell considerably short of the oldest.’ Ammonius rejoined: ‘Then it has escaped all the others who keep up unextinguished fires, and preserve them for a number of years which we may call infinite. Assume, however, that what is said is true; is it not better to take the cause to be atmospheric chills or moisture, which might probably weaken the fire so that it would not consume or need so much fuel; on the other hand, times of dryness or heat? Before now I have heard it said of fire that it burns better and with more strength in winter, being [Sidenote: D]