XIV. “I shall lay nothing new before you,” said Philus, “nor any thing discovered or thought of by myself. I remember, however, that C. Sulpicius Gallus, a very learned man as you know; when this same phenomenon was stated to have been seen, being by chance in the house of M. Marcellus, who had been in the consulate with him; ordered a sphere to be placed before him, which the ancestor of M. Marcellus had taken from the conquered Syracusans, and brought out of their wealthy and embellished city; the only thing he had possessed himself of among so great a spoil. I had heard a great deal of this sphere, on account of the fame of Archimedes, but did not admire the construction of it so much; for another which Archimedes also had made, and which the same Marcellus had placed in the temple of virtue, was more elegant and remarkable in the general opinion. But subsequently, when Gallus began very scientifically to explain the nature of the mechanism; the Sicilian appeared to me to possess more genius, than human nature would seem to be capable of. Gallus said, that the other solid and full sphere was an old invention, and was first wrought by Thales of Miletas: but afterwards was delineated over with the fixed stars in the heavens by Eudoxus, the Cnidian, a disciple of Plato. The which adorned and embellished as it was by Eudoxus, Aratus who had no knowledge of astronomy, but a certain poetical faculty, many years afterwards extolled in his verses. The mechanism of this sphere, however, on which the motions of the sun, moon, and those five stars which are called wandering and irregular, are shown; could not be illustrated on that solid sphere. But what appeared very admirable in this invention of Archimedes was, that he had discovered a method of producing the unequal and various courses, with their dissimilar velocities, by one revolution. When Gallus put this sphere in motion, the moon was made to succeed the sun by as many revolutions of the brass circle, as it actually took days to do in the heavens. From which the same setting of the sun was produced on the sphere as in the heavens: and the moon fell on the very point, where it met the shadow of the earth, when the sun from the region * * * * [About ten pages wanting.]