Page:The Natural History of Pliny.djvu/86

 52 plint's natueal histoet. [Book II. thrown off not losing its divine operation. And this takes place more particularly when the air is in an unsettled state, either because the moisture which is then collected excites the greatest quantity of fire, or because the air is disturbed, as if by the parturition of the pregnant star. CHAP. 19. (21.) — OP THE niSTAITCES OF THE STAES. Many persons have attempted to discover the distance of thie stars from the earth, and they have published as the result, that the sun is nineteen times as far from the moon, as the moon herself is from the earth Pythagoras, who was a man of a very sagacious mind, computed the distance from the earth to the moon to be 126,000 furlongs, that from her to the sun is double this distance, and that it is three times this distance to the twelve signs ^ ; and this was also the opinion of our countryman, Gallus Sulpicius^. CHAP. 20. (22.) — OP THE HAEMOirr OP THE STAES. Pythagoras, employing the terms that are used in music, sometimes names the distance between the Earth and the Moon a tone ; from her to Mercury he supposes to be half this space, and about the same from liim to Venus. Erom her to the Sun is a tone and a half; from the Sun to Mars is a tone, the same as from the Earth to the Moon ; from him there is half a tone to Jupiter, from Jupiter to Saturn also 1 Alexandre remarks, that Pliny mentions tliis, not as his own opinion, but that of many persons ; for, in chap. 21, he attempts to prove mathe- matically, that the moon is situated at an equal distance between the sim. and the earth ; Lemaire, ii. 286. 2 Marcus remarks upon the inconsistency between the account here given of Pythagoras' s opinion, and what is generally supposed to have been his theory of the planetary system, according to which the sun, and not the earth, is placed ia the centre ; Enfield's Philosophy, i. 288, 289. Yet we find that Plato, and many others among the ancients, give us the same accotmt of Pythagoras's doctrine of the respective distances of the heavenly bodies; Ajasson, ii. 374. Plato in his Timseus, 9. p. 312-315, details the comphcated arrangement which he supposes to constitute the proportionate distances of the planetary bodies. 3 Sulpicius has abeady been mentioned, in the ninth chapter of this book, as being the first among the Eomans who gave a popular explana- tion of the cause of ecUpses.