_B._ If the earth be all of one kind, it will. For the parallel motion, will there also at the first entrance be resisted, which it was not before it entered. _A._ How then comes a bullet, when shot very obliquely into any broad water, and having entered, yet to rise again into the air? _B._ When a bullet is shot very obliquely, though the motion be never so swift, yet the approach downwards to the water is very slow, and when it cometh to it, it casteth up much water before it, which with its weight presseth downwards again, and maketh the water to rise under the bullet with force enough to master the weak motion of the bullet downwards, and to make it rise in such manner as bodies use to rise by reflection. _A._ By what motion (seeing you ascribe all effects to motion) can a loadstone draw iron to it? _B._ By the same motion hitherto supposed. But though all the smallest parts of the earth have this motion, yet it is not supposed that their motions are in equal circles; nor that they keep just time with one another; nor that they have all the same poles. If they had, all bodies would draw one another alike. For such an agreement of motion, of way, of swiftness, and of poles, cannot be maintained, without the conjunction of the bodies themselves in the centre of their common motion, but by violence. If therefore the iron have but so much of the nature of the loadstone as readily to receive from it the like motion, as one string of a lute doth from another string strained to the same note, (as it is like enough it hath, the loadstone being but one kind of iron ore), it must needs after that motion received from it, unless the greatness of the weight hinder, come nearer to it, because at distance their motions will differ in time, and oppose each other, whereby they will be forced to a common centre. If the iron be lifted up from the earth, the motion of the loadstone must be stronger, or the body of it nearer, to overcome the weight; and then the iron will leap up to the loadstone as swiftly, as from the same distance it would fall down to the earth; but if both the stone and the iron be set floating upon the water, the attraction will begin to be manifest at a greater distance, because the hindrance of the weight is in part removed. _A._ But why does the loadstone, if it float on a calm water, never fail to place itself at last in the meridian just north and south. _B._ Not so, just in the meridian, but almost in all places with some variations. But the cause I think is, that the axis of this magnetical motion is parallel to the axis of the ecliptic, which is the axis of the like motion in the earth, and consequently that it cannot freely exercise its natural motion in any other situation. _A._ Whence may this consent of motion in the loadstone and the earth proceed? Do you think, as some have written, that the earth is a great loadstone?