Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/244

 since nature always acts through a few rather than through many; and it is more agreeable to reason that the Earth's one small body should make a diurnal rotation, than that the whole universe should be whirled around. I pass over the reasons of the Earth's remaining motions, for at present the only question is concerning its diurnal movement, according to which it moves round with respect to the Sun, and creates a natural day (which we call a nycthemeron). And indeed Nature may be thought to have granted a motion very suitable to the Earth's shape, which (being sphærical) is revolved about the poles assigned it by Nature much more easily and fittingly than that the whole universe, whose limit is unknown and unknowable, should be whirled round; and than there could be imagined an orbit of the Primum Mobile, a thing not accepted by the ancients, which Aristotle even did not devise or accept as in any shape or form existing beyond the sphære of the fixed stars; which finally the sacred scriptures do not recognize any more than they do the revolution of the firmament.

F then the philosophers of the common sort, with an unspeakable absurdity, imagine the whole heaven and the vast extent of the universe to rotate in a whirl, it yet remains that the earth performs a diurnal change. For in no third way can the apparent revolutions be explained. This day, then, which is called natural, is a revolution of some meridian of the Earth from Sun to Sun. It revolves indeed in an entire course, from a fixed star round to that star again. Those bodies which in nature are moved with a circular, æquable and constant motion, are furnished, in their parts, with various boundaries. But the Earth is not a Chaos nor disordered mass; but by reason of its astral virtue, it has boundaries which subserve the circular motion, poles not mathematical, an æquator not devised by imagination, meridians also and parallels; all of which we find permanent, certain and natural in the Earth: which by numerous experiments the whole magnetick philosophy sets forth. For in the earth there are poles set in fixed bounds, and at them the verticity mounts up on either side from the plane of the Earth's æquator, with forces which are mightier and præpotent from the common action of the whole; and with these poles the diurnal revolution is in agreement. But in no turnings-about of bodies, in none of the motions of the planets are there to be recognized, beheld, or assured to us by any reasoning any sensible or natural poles in the firmament, or in any Primum