red miles together, and for extremity of cold to lose their fingers and
toes. Tycho will have two distinct matters of heaven and air; but to say
truth, with some small qualification, they have one and the self-same
opinion about the essence and matter of heavens; that it is not hard and
impenetrable, as peripatetics hold, transparent, of a _quinta essentia_,
[3084]"but that it is penetrable and soft as the air itself is, and that
the planets move in it, as birds in the air, fishes in the sea." This they
prove by motion of comets, and otherwise (though Claremontius in his
Antitycho stiffly opposes), which are not generated, as Aristotle teacheth,
in the aerial region, of a hot and dry exhalation, and so consumed: but as
Anaxagoras and Democritus held of old, of a celestial matter: and as [3085]
Tycho, [3086]Eliseus, Roeslin, Thaddeus, Haggesius, Pena, Rotman,
Fracastorius, demonstrate by their progress, parallaxes, refractions,
motions of the planets, which interfere and cut one another's orbs, now
higher, and then lower, as [Symbol: Mars] amongst the rest, which
sometimes, as [3087]Kepler confirms by his own, and Tycho's accurate
observations, comes nearer the earth than the [Symbol: Sun] and is again
eftsoons aloft in Jupiter's orb; and [3088]other sufficient reasons, far
above the moon: exploding in the meantime that element of fire, those
fictitious first watery movers, those heavens I mean above the firmament,
which Delrio, Lodovicus Imola, Patricius, and many of the fathers affirm;
those monstrous orbs of eccentrics, and _Eccentre Epicycles deserentes_.
Which howsoever Ptolemy, Alhasen, Vitellio, Purbachius, Maginus, Clavius,
and many of their associates, stiffly maintain to be real orbs, eccentric,
concentric, circles aequant, &c. are absurd and ridiculous. For who is so
mad to think that there should be so many circles, like subordinate wheels
in a clock, all impenetrable and hard, as they feign, add and subtract at
their pleasure. [3089]Maginus makes eleven heavens, subdivided into their
orbs and circles, and all too little to serve those particular appearances:
Fracastorius, seventy-two homocentrics; Tycho Brahe, Nicholas Ramerus,
Heliseus Roeslin, have peculiar hypotheses of their own inventions; and
they be but inventions, as most of them acknowledge, as we admit of
equators, tropics, colures, circles arctic and antarctic, for doctrine's
sake (though Ramus thinks them all unnecessary), they will have them
suppos