the worse it is perishable; therefore, the world is perishable, for it can be dried up, and it can be covered with water. Now the world was created when its substance was changed from fire to moisture, by the action of the air; and then its denser parts coagulated, and so the earth was made, and the thinner portions were evaporated and became air; and this being rarefied more and more, produced fire. And then, by the combination of all these elements, were produced plants and animals, and other kinds of things. Now Zeno speaks of the creation, and of the destruction of the world, in his treatise on the Universe, and so does Cleanthes, and so does Antipater, in the tenth book of his treatise on the World. But Panætius asserts that the world is imperishable. Again, that the world is an animal, and that it is endued with reason, and life, and intellect, is affirmed by Chrysippus, in the first volume of his treatise on Providence, and by Apollodorus in his Natural Philosophy, and by Posidonius; and that it is an animal in this sense, as being an essence endued with life, and with sensation. For that which is an animal, is better than that which is not an animal. But nothing is better than the world; therefore the world is an animal. And it is endued with life, as is plain from the fact of our own soul being as it were a fragment broken off from it. But Boethus denies that the world is an animal. Again, that the world is one, is affirmed by Zeno, in his treatise on the Universe, and by Chrysippus, and by Apollodorus, in his Natural Philosophy, and by Posidonius, in the first book of his Discourses on Natural Philosophy. And by the term, the universe, according to Apollodorus, is understood both the world itself, and also the whole of the world itself, and of the exterior vacuum taken together. The world, then, is finite, and the vacuum infinite. LXXI. Of the stars, those which are fixed are only moved in connection with the movements of the entire heaven; but the planets move according to their own peculiar and separate motions. And the sun takes an oblique path through the circle of the zodiac, and in the same manner also does the moon, which is of a winding form. And the sun is pure fire, as Posidonius asserts in the seventh book of his treatise on the Heavenly Bodies, and it is larger than the earth, as the same author informs us, in the sixteenth book of his Disclosures on Natural Philosophy. Also it is spherical, as he says in another place, being made on the same principle as the world is. Therefore it is fire, because it performs all the functions of fire. And it is larger than the earth, as is proved by the fact of the whole earth being illuminated by it, and also the whole heaven. Also the fact of the earth throwing a conical shadow, proves that the sun is greater than it, and the sun is seen in every part, because of its magnitude. But the moon is of a more earthy nature than the sun, inasmuch as it is nearer the earth.