The Anatomy of Melancholy

Helisaeus Roeslin criticizes both, together with Copernicus, whose hypothesis “on the earth’s motion” Philippus Lansbergen has lately vindicated and demonstrated with solid arguments in a substantial volume, and Janssonius Caesius has illustrated with a sphere. The said Johannes Lansbergen has since, in 1633, defended his assertion against all the objections and slanders of Fromondus’s Anti-Aristarchus, Jean-Baptiste Morin, and Petrus Bartholinus. Fromondus wrote against him again in 1634; F. Ross of Aberdeen, and so on—sound drums and trumpets!

Meanwhile Roeslin, I say, criticizes them all, and Ptolemy himself, as inadequate. One offends against natural philosophy, another against optical principles, a third against mathematical ones, by failing to correspond to astronomical observations. One sets a great space between Saturn’s sphere and the eighth sphere; another makes it too narrow. In his own hypothesis he makes the earth the universal centre as before, and the sun the centre for the five upper planets. He assigns daily motion to the eighth sphere, and eccentrics and epicycles to the seven planets—devices previously rejected. And so,

While fools avoid one fault, they run into its opposite,

As a tinker stops one hole and makes two, he corrects them and does worse himself: reforms some things and spoils everything.

Meanwhile the world is tossed in a blanket among them. They hoist the earth up and down like a ball, making it stand still or move as they please. One says the sun stands still; another, that it moves. A third comes in and catches them all on the rebound. And lest any paradox should be missing, he discovers certain spots and clouds in the sun with the help of telescopes, which, Kepler says, make an object appear a thousand times larger in area and bring it thirty-two times nearer to the observer’s eye. But see Tarde’s explanation of this instrument: its evidence requires either the sun to turn about its own centre or the spots to move around the sun.

Fabricius allows only three, and places them in the sun; Apelles fifteen, and outside the sun, floating like the Cyanean Islands in the Black Sea. Tarde the Frenchman has observed thirty-three, and takes them to be neither spots nor clouds, as Galileo supposes in his Letter to Welser, but planets moving regularly in orbits centred on the sun and not far from it.

Christopher Shemer, a German Swiss Jesuit, divides them in his Ursica Rosa into “spots and bright patches.” He maintains that they are fixed “on the sun’s surface” and complete their regular periodic motion in twenty-seven or twenty-eight days, also holding that the sun rotates about its centre. They are all so confident that they have drawn diagrams and tables of these movements.

The Dutchman, in his Little Discussion with Apelles, criticizes them all. Thus they disagree among themselves, old and new, irreconcilable in their opinions. Thus Aristarchus, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, al-Battani, al-Farghani, Tycho, Reimers, Roeslin, Fracastoro, Copernicus and his adherents, Clavius, Magini, and the rest, with their followers, differ and pronounce upon these celestial spheres and bodies.