Nothing is generated in a place where is no sentient vegetable and rational life; feathers grow on birds and change every year; coats grow on animals and are changed every year, with some {163} exceptions, like the lion's beard and the cat's fur, and such; grass grows in the fields and leaves on the trees; and every year they are renewed in great part. Thus we can say that the spirit of growth is the soul of the earth, the soil its flesh, the ordered arrangement of rocks its bones, of which mountains are formed, the tufa its tendons; its blood the veins of water which surround its heart, which is the ocean; its breathing and increase and decrease of blood in the pulses the ebb and flood of the sea; and the heat of the spirit of the world is fire which pervades the earth, and the vital soul dwells in the fires which from various apertures of the earth issue in springs and sulphur minerals and volcanoes, as at Mount Etna in Sicily and in many other places. 52. The ancients called man the world in miniature, and certainly the name is a happy one, because man being composed of earth, water, air and fire, the body of the earth resembles the body of man. As man has in him bones for the support and framework of his flesh, likewise in the world the rocks are the supports of the earth; as man has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in their breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean which rises and falls every six hours as if the world breathed; as from the aforesaid pool of blood veins issue which {164} ramify throughout the human body, so does the ocean fill the body of the earth with innumerable veins of water. The body of the earth lacks sinews, which do not exist because sinews are made for movement, and the world being in perpetual stability no movement occurs, and there being no movement, sinews are not necessary; but in all other points they resemble each other greatly. 53. Water is the driver of nature. [Sidenote: Experience the Basis of Science] 54. In explaining the action of water remember to cite experience first and then reason. 55. Do not forget that you must put forward propositions adducing the above-mentioned facts as illustrations, not as propositions,--that would be too simple. 56. Water in itself has no stability and cannot move of its own accord, save to descend. Water of its own accord does not cease to move unless it is shut in. 57. The body of the earth, like the body of animals, is intersected with ramifying veins, which are all {165} united and constructed for the nourishment and life of the earth and of its creatures. [Sidenote: Water is the Blood of the World] 58.