The Anatomy of Melancholy

I would scrutinize all the lies of Pliny, Solinus, Strabo, Sir John Mandeville, Olaus Magnus, and Marco Polo; correct those errors in navigation; revise maps of the world; and correct longitudes, if possible. I would not do it by the compass, as some imagine along with Mark Ridley in chapter 43 of his Treatise of Magnetic Bodies, for, as Cabeus decisively concludes in book 3, chapter 4 of his Magnetic Philosophy, there is no hope from that quarter. Still, I would look for better means of determining them.

I would find a suitable place to go down with Orpheus, Ulysses, Hercules, or Lucian’s Menippus—at St Patrick’s Purgatory, Trophonius’s cave, Hekla in Iceland, or Etna in Sicily—and descend to see what happens in the bowels of the earth. Do stones and metals still grow there? How is it that fir trees are dug out of hilltops, as they are from our peat bogs and marshes all over Europe?

How do people come to dig up fish bones, shells, beams, ironwork many fathoms underground, and anchors in mountains far from any sea? In 1460, at Bern in Switzerland, a ship was dug out of a mountain where metal ore was being mined, fifty fathoms deep; inside it were forty-eight human corpses, along with other merchandise.

Aristotle suggests in his Meteorology that such things are commonly found on hilltops, as does Pomponius Mela in the chapter on Numidia in his first book; and Biancani the Jesuit says similar things are frequently seen in the Alps. Did this result from earthquakes, or from Noah’s Flood, as Christians suppose? Or do sea and land change places, as Anaximenes held long ago, so that the mountains of Thessaly would become seas, and seas become mountains again?

Presumably the whole world would be remoulded whenever those all-commanding Powers thought fit, and turned inside out as we turn haycocks at harvest, top to bottom or bottom to top. Or, as we turn apples towards the fire, they might move the world about its centre: what now lies beneath the poles would be shifted to the equator, and what lies beneath the torrid zone would at another time be moved to the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, so that each in turn would be warmed by the sun.

Or, if there are infinitely many worlds and every fixed star is a sun with planets circling it, as Bruno and Campanella conclude, they might cast three or four worlds into one, or make three or four new ones out of a single old world, as seems best to them.

To continue: if the earth is 21,500 miles in circumference, its diameter is 7,000 miles from us to our antipodes; and what is contained in all that space? What is at the earth’s centre? Is it nothing but the pure element earth, as Aristotle rules? Is it inhabited, as Paracelsus thinks, by creatures whose native realm is earth, or by fairies, as the woods and waters, according to him, are inhabited by nymphs, or the air by spirits?

Dionysodorus, the mathematician mentioned in Pliny who, after his death, sent a letter from the centre of the earth “to those above” to report its distance from the surface—namely 42,000 stadia—might usefully have settled all these doubts.