One wet day when I had visitors here, we happened to be speaking of how things ran in sevens--the seven planets, the seven liberal arts, the seven deadly sins, and so on. There were seven of us in the house and we drew lots, to fill up time until the rain would let us out. When I drew Gluttony, they said it was appropriate; and we had all said it was appropriate when a lady with blue stockings drew Astronomy, and again when she drew Chastity; but it was a little embarrassing when she drew Lust as well. The seven planets were Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon; and Pythagoras said these seven and the Firmament of Stars and our Earth and the other Earth (Antichthon) were all revolving round a Central Fire. I thought that I had met a follower of his a little while ago. I said something about the sunlight, and was told that I was wrong--light did not come from the Sun. I hoped to hear him say that light came from the Central Fire and was reflected from the Sun, for he seemed to think that something came from there, as he was sitting in the shade. But he referred me to the Bible, where it is distinctly said that Light was created on the first day but the Sun was not created till the fourth. Pythagoras fancied that there must be simple ratios for the distances between the heavenly bodies and the Central Fire, and that the motion of these bodies would therefore cause harmonious sounds, just as octaves and fifths and fourths arise from lengths of string with ratios of 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 and 3 to 4. There were two answers to the question why no one ever heard this Music of the Spheres. Aristotle (_De Cælo_, II. 9) makes the Pythagoreans say that we all hear it from the moment we are born, only we never notice it, as it is always going on. (If so, they must have thought it was a chord and not a tune.) The other answer, Aristotle’s own, was that there was not anything to hear. There are many versions of the Music of the Spheres; but judging by what Ptolemy says (_Harmonica_, III. 16, and _Excerpta Neapolitana_, 2, 24) I think Pythagoras put the Firmament at 36, Saturn at 32, Jupiter at 24, Mars at 21⅓, the Sun at 18, Venus at 16, Mercury at 12, the Moon at 9, the Earth at 8, and (probably) the Antichthon at 6, with the Central Fire at 0. Thus, if the Firmament gave forth the sound of _f_, the Sun gave _f_ an octave higher up and the Moon gave _f_ an octave higher still. Saturn, Venus and the Earth gave _g_ in these three octaves, and Jupiter, Mercury and the Antichthon gave _c_ in these three octaves also, while Mars gave _d_ in the lowest octave by itself. And if that is what these orbs are ‘quiring to the young-eyed cherubins,’ I do not much regret ‘this muddy vesture of decay’ that hinders me from hearing it.