The Anatomy of Melancholy

Tycho maintains that heaven and air are made of two distinct substances. But in truth, with some small qualification, they share one and the same opinion about the substance and matter of the heavens: that it is not hard and impenetrable, as the Aristotelians hold—a transparent “fifth essence”—but penetrable and soft as air itself, and that the planets move in it as birds do in the air and fish in the sea.

They prove this by the motion of comets and in other ways, though Chiaramonti firmly opposes it in his Anti-Tycho. Comets are not generated, as Aristotle teaches, in the region of air from a hot, dry exhalation and then consumed, but consist of celestial matter, as Anaxagoras and Democritus held long ago.

Tycho, Eliseus, Roeslin, Thaddeus, Hagecius, Pena, Rothmann, and Fracastoro demonstrate this from their courses, parallaxes, and refractions, and from the motions of the planets, which intersect and cut across one another’s spheres, now higher and then lower. Mars, among the rest, sometimes comes nearer to the earth than the sun, as Kepler confirms from his own and Tycho’s accurate observations, and at another time is again high in Jupiter’s sphere.

There are other sufficient reasons for placing them far above the moon. Meanwhile, this rejects that element of fire, those imaginary first watery movers—I mean the heavens above the firmament affirmed by Del Río, Lodovicus Imola, Patrizi, and many of the Church Fathers—and those monstrous spheres of eccentrics, and eccentric circles carrying epicycles.

However firmly Ptolemy, Alhazen, Witelo, Peurbach, Magini, Clavius, and many of their associates maintain that these are real spheres—eccentric, concentric, equant circles, and so on—they are absurd and ridiculous. Who is so mad as to think there are so many circles, like interconnected wheels in a clock, all hard and impenetrable, as these men imagine, adding and subtracting at will?

Magini makes eleven heavens, subdivided into their spheres and circles, and all are too few to account for those particular appearances. Fracastoro makes seventy-two concentric spheres. Tycho Brahe, Nicolaus Reimers, Heliseus, and Roeslin have peculiar hypotheses of their own invention; and they are only inventions, as most of them acknowledge. Just as we admit equators, tropics, colures, and Arctic and Antarctic Circles for the sake of teaching—though Ramius thinks them all unnecessary—they would have these supposed only for method and order.