Page:The Natural History of Pliny.djvu/128

 94 plint's natueal history. [Book II. slaugliter, and war, and that, while we drench her with our blood, we cover her with unburied bones ; and being covered with these and her anger being thus appeased, she conceals the crimes of mortals I consider the ignorance of her natui-e as one of the evil effects of an ungrateful mind. CHAP. 64. (64.) — or the poem or the eaeth. Every one agrees that it has the most perfect figure^^. "We- always speak of the ball of the earth, and we admit it to be a globe bounded by the poles. It has not indeed the form of an absolute sphere, from the number of lofty moun- tains and flat plains ; but if the termination of the lines be bounded by a curved this would compose a perfect sphere. And this we learn fr'om arguments drawn from the nature of things, although not from the same considerations which we made use of with respect to the heavens. Por in these the hollow convexity everywhere bends on itself, and leans upon the earth as its centre. "Whereas the earth rises up solid and dense, like something that swells up and is protruded outwards. The heavens bend towards the centre, while the earth goes from the centre, the continual rolling of the heavens about it forcing its immense globe into the form of a sphere^. CHAP. 65. (65.) — WHETHEE THEEE BE Al^TIPODES ? On this point there is a great contest between the learned 1 " ossa vel insepulta cmn tempore teUus occultat, deprimentia pouxlere Buo mollitam pluviis humum." Alexandre, in Lemaire, i. 370. 2 " fio-iira prima." I may refer to the second chapter of this book, where the author remarked upon the form of the earth as perfect in all its parts, and especially adapted for its supposed position in the centre of the universe. . 3 " si capita linearum comprehendantur ambitu ; the meanmg of this passage would appear to be : if the extremities of the Imes di-awn from the centre of the earth to the different parts of the surface were con- nected together, the result of the whole would be a sphere. I must, how- erer, remark, that Hardouin interprets it in a somewhat different manner ; "Si 'per extremitates linearum ductarum a centro ad summos quosque vertices montium circulus exigatur." Lemaire, i. 370. 4 " immensvim ejus globum in formam orbis assidua circa earn mundi volubihtate cogente." As Hardouin remarks, the word mundus is here used in the sense of ccelum. Lemaire, i. 371.