Some observe new motions of the heavens, new stars, “wandering stars,” comets, clouds—call them what you will—like those recently discovered Medicean, Bourbon, and Austrian planets. These do not perish, but come and go, rise higher and lower, hide and show themselves among the fixed stars and the planets, above and below the moon, at set times; now nearer, now farther away, together, apart. Just as a player on a sackbut changes his notes and tunes by pulling it up and down, so they change their positions and places, though we do not perceive it. From these movements, they believe, various changes proceed. Clavius conjectures otherwise, but they are only conjectures.

The country around Damascus in Coele-Syria is a Paradise because of the abundance of water: “the cause is plain.” The deserts of Arabia are barren because of rocks, rolling seas of sand, and dry mountains: “because the land is waterless,” says Adricomius, “with mountains rugged, rocky, precipitous, presenting an image of horror and death.” It is therefore uninhabitable by people, birds, and beasts, without green trees, plants, or fruits: a vast, rocky, dreadful wilderness that no skill can cultivate. This is evident. Bohemia is cold because it lies far to the north.

But why should Egypt be so hot, or never have rain? Why should those Etesian and north-easterly winds blow continually and steadily for so long in some places, at set times, always in one direction, only during the dog days? Why perpetual drought here and falling showers there; foggy mists here and pleasant air there; terrible thunder and lightning at particular seasons here; seas frozen all year here and open at the same latitude there, while elsewhere nothing like this occurs—indeed, quite the opposite?

Sometimes, as in Peru, it is hot on one side of the mountains and cold on the other; here snow, there wind, with countless similar differences. Fromondus, in his Meteors, would account for or explain all this by the sun’s motion. But when there are such differences between people on the same latitude, or in very nearby places, how can that position hold?

Who can explain this variety of atmospheric phenomena: that it should rain stones, frogs, mice, and so on? The rats they call lemmings in Norway are clearly observed by the inhabitants, as Münster writes, to descend and fall in certain filthy showers, and, like so many locusts, devour everything green.

Leo Africanus says much the same of locusts: around Fez in Barbary, countless swarms suddenly appear in their fields. The same calamity occurred at Arles in France in 1553: all their grass and crops were devoured, “to the great amazement and consternation of the inhabitants,” as Valleriola relates in book 1, observation 1 of his Medical Observations. “They suddenly darkened the sky,” and so on. He concludes that this could not come from natural causes; they cannot imagine where the creatures come from except heaven.

Are these and similar creatures, grain, wood, stones, worms, wool, blood, and so on, lifted into the middle region by the sun’s rays, as the physician Baricellus discusses, and then dropped with showers; or are they generated there? Cornelius Gemma holds that view: they are conceived there through celestial influences. Others suppose that they come directly from God, or are prodigies produced by the craft and illusions of spirits, the princes of the air. Bodin subscribes to this view in book 2 of his Theatre of Nature.

In short, on atmospheric phenomena generally, Aristotle’s explanations are rejected by Bernardino Telesio; his principles are refuted by Paracelsus, and other causes assigned—salt, sulphur, and mercury. Paracelsus’s disciples are so expert in these that they can alter elements and separate them at will, produce perpetual motions, not through some magnetic power, as Cardan, Taisnier, and Peregrinus propose, but by mixing elements;

imitate thunder, like Salmoneus, snow, hail, and the ebb and flow of the sea; give life to creatures, so they say, without reproduction—and what else besides? Pedro Nunes of Alcácer do Sal and Kepler undertake to demonstrate that no atmospheric phenomena, clouds, fogs, or vapours rise higher than fifty or eighty miles, and that all the rest is pure air or the element of fire.

Cardan, Tycho, and Jean Pena plainly refute this by refraction and many other arguments: there is no such element of fire at all. If, as Tycho proves, the moon is fifty or sixty earth radii away from us, and if, as Pedro Nunes maintains, the air occupies so narrow a space,

what proportion is there between it and the other three elements? What purpose does it serve? Is it full of spirits dwelling there, as the Paracelsians and Platonists hold—the higher, the nobler? Is it full of birds, or a mere vacuum serving no purpose?

Tycho Brahe and Christoph Rothmann, mathematician to the Landgrave of Hesse, debate at length in their Astronomical Letters whether the air and the heavens have the same “transparent medium,” the same transparency and matter, or are two distinct substances.

Christoph Rothmann, Jean Pena, Giordano Bruno, and many other recent mathematicians maintain that it is the same: one substance throughout, becoming ever purer and finer the higher it rises. They say this is found by experience on the tops of certain mountains in America: if someone climbs up, he immediately faints for lack of denser air to cool the heart.

Acosta, in book 3, chapter 9, calls this mountain Pariacaca, in Peru. It makes those who climb it retch and vomit, he says, as do other mountains of the Andes in the deserts of Chile for five hundred miles together; and through the extreme cold they lose their fingers and toes.