The Anatomy of Melancholy

I would observe all those movements of the sea and what causes them: the moon, as people commonly believe; or the earth's motion, which Galileo so earnestly proves and firmly demonstrates in the fourth dialogue of his System of the World; or winds, as some maintain.

Why is this motion scarcely perceptible in that quiet Ocean of Zur, “in the Pacific Sea,” most violent in our British seas, and so strong, irregular and varied in the Mediterranean and Red Sea? Why should the current in the Atlantic Ocean continually flow away from the north in some places and towards it in others? And why is the journey one way quicker than the return?

So, too, in the Indian Ocean, merchants travel from Malabar to Madagascar in three weeks, as Scaliger discusses, but scarcely return in three months, with the same or similar winds. The continual current flows from east to west.

Whether Mount Athos, Pelion, Olympus, Ossa, Caucasus and Atlas are as high as Pliny, Solinus and Mela report, above clouds and atmospheric phenomena, “where neither breezes nor winds blow”—so high that climbers very often die suddenly because the air is so thin. Are they 1,250 paces high, according to Dicaearchus's measurement; or seventy-eight miles vertically, as Jacopo Mazzoni says in sections 3 and 4, explaining Aristotle's passage about Mount Caucasus;

and as the Jesuit Blancanus argues from the demonstrations concerning twilight by Clavius and Nonius? Or rather thirty-two stadia, as the most widely accepted opinion has it; or four miles, a vertical height that no mountain exceeds, and which equals the sea's greatest depths—1,580 paces, according to Scaliger, exercise 38, though others say a hundred paces.

I would see the interior of America: whether there is such a great city as Manoa, or El Dorado, in that golden empire, where the highways, one writer reports, are as well travelled as those between Madrid and Valladolid in Spain; or such Amazons as he describes, or gigantic Patagonians in Chica; and that marvellous mountain Ybouyapab in northern Brazil, “whose ridge spreads out into a most delightful plain,” and so forth; or Pariacaca, rising so high in Peru.

How high is the peak of Tenerife: seventy miles, or fifty, as Patrizi holds, or nine, as Snellius demonstrates in his Eratosthenes? I would see that strange Lake Cirknickzersey in Carniola, whose waters gush from the ground so fast that they can overtake a swift horseman, and shortly afterwards are swallowed up with equally incredible speed. Lazius and Warnerus take this as evidence that the Argonauts sailed underground.

And that vast cavern or pit called Esmellen in Muscovy, “which is seen gaping fearfully,” and so forth: if anything happens to fall into it, it makes such a roaring noise that no thunder, artillery or engine of war can equal it. Another such place is Gilber's Cave in Lapland, and there are many like them.