The Anatomy of Melancholy

MEMBER 3. Air corrected. With a digression on air.

As a long-winged hawk, first whistled off the fist, mounts aloft and for its pleasure makes many circuits in the air, soaring higher and higher until it reaches its full height, and then, when the game is flushed, comes down at speed and suddenly dives: so will I. Having at last reached these spacious fields of air, where I may range freely and exercise myself for recreation, I will roam for a while, wander around the world, rise to those ethereal orbs and celestial spheres, and then descend to my former elements again.

On this journey I will first see whether the Oxford friar's account of those northern regions beneath the Pole is true. If I happen to meet the Wandering Jew, Elias the Adept or Lucian's Icaromenippus along the way, they shall be my guides. I will see whether there really are four such tidal channels and a great rock of lodestone that might make the compass needle continually turn in that direction;

and what the true cause of the compass's variation may be. Is it a magnetic rock, or the Pole Star, as Cardan thinks; some other star in the Bear, as Marsilio Ficino proposes; a magnetic meridian, as Maurolycus says; “or its position in a vein of the earth,” as Agricola suggests; the nearness of the adjoining continent, as Cabeus thinks; or some other cause, as Scaliger, Cortesius, the Coimbra commentators and Peregrinus argue?

Why does it point directly north at the Azores, but not elsewhere? In the Mediterranean, or Levant, some observers find that it varies by seven degrees, then twelve, then twenty-two. In the Baltic Sea near Raseburg in Finland, the needle spins round if ships come that way, although Martin Ridley writes otherwise: that near the Pole the needle can hardly be forced away from its direction.

It deserves investigation whether definite rules can be established for it—for example, “the variation at London is eleven degrees, elsewhere thirty-six,” and so forth. More extraordinary still, the variation itself changes in the same place: accurately measured now, it will be quite different a few years later. Until we have better information, let our Dr Gilbert and the Jesuit Niccolò Cabeo, who have both written substantial volumes on the subject, satisfy these investigators.

Whether the sea is open and navigable near the Arctic Pole, and which route is most promising: that of Bartison the Dutchman, directly beneath the Pole itself, which for certain reasons I think best; or by Davis Strait, or Novaya Zemlya.

Whether Hudson's report of a newly discovered ocean is true; whether there is any prospect of a passage by Button's Bay at fifty degrees, Hubberd's Hope at sixty, or the place marked “still farther” near Sir Thomas Roe's Welcome in North-west Fox, since the sea there regularly rises and falls fifteen feet in twelve hours. Our new charts tell us that California is an island, not a cape, and that west winds make the neap tides equal to the spring tides. Or whether there is any chance of passing through the Strait of Anian to China, by the promontory of Tabin.