_B._ It is true. Do you find any experiment to the contrary? _A._ Yes; for if you remove one of the plummets from the perpendicular, so as, for example, to make an angle with the perpendicular of eighty degrees, and the other so as to make an angle of sixty degrees; they will not make their turns and returns in equal times. _B._ And what say you is the cause of this? _A._ Because the arches are the spaces which these two motions describe, they must be in double proportion to their own times: which cannot be, unless they be let go from equal altitudes, that is, from equal angles. _B._ It is right; and the experiment does not cross, but confirm the equality of the times in all the arches they describe, even from ninety degrees to the least part of one degree. _A._ But is it not too bold, if not extravagant an assertion, to say the earth is moved as a man shakes a basin or a sieve? Does not the earth move from west to east every day once, upon its own centre; and in the ecliptic circle once a year? And now you give it another odd motion. How can all these consist in one and the same body? _B._ Well enough. If you be a shipboard under sail, do not you go with the ship? Cannot you also walk upon the deck? Cannot every drop of blood move at the same time in your veins? How many motions now do you assign to one and the same drop of blood? Nor is it so extravagant a thing to attribute to the earth this kind of motion; but that I believe, if we certainly knew what motion it is that causeth the descent of bodies, we should find it either the same, or more extravagant. But seeing it can be nothing above that worketh this effect, it must be the earth itself that does it; and if the earth, then you can imagine no other motion to do it withal but this. And you will wonder more, when by the same motion I shall give you a probable account of the causes of very many other works of nature. _A._ But what part of the heaven do you suppose the poles of your pricked circle point to? _B._ I suppose them to be the same with the poles of the ecliptic. For, seeing the axis of the earth in this motion and in the annual motion, keeps parallel to itself, the axis must in both motions be parallel as to sense. For the circle which the earth describes, is not of visible magnitude at the distance it is from the sun. _A._ Though I understand well enough how the earth may make a stone descend very swiftly under the ecliptic, or not far from it, where it throws off the air perpendicularly; yet about the poles of the circle methinks, it should cast off the air very weakly. I hope you will not say, that bodies descend faster in places remote from the poles, than nearer to them.