The Anatomy of Melancholy

Are these and similar creatures, grain, wood, stones, worms, wool, blood, and so on, lifted into the middle region by the sun’s rays, as the physician Baricellus discusses, and then dropped with showers; or are they generated there? Cornelius Gemma holds that view: they are conceived there through celestial influences. Others suppose that they come directly from God, or are prodigies produced by the craft and illusions of spirits, the princes of the air. Bodin subscribes to this view in book 2 of his Theatre of Nature.

In short, on atmospheric phenomena generally, Aristotle’s explanations are rejected by Bernardino Telesio; his principles are refuted by Paracelsus, and other causes assigned—salt, sulphur, and mercury. Paracelsus’s disciples are so expert in these that they can alter elements and separate them at will, produce perpetual motions, not through some magnetic power, as Cardan, Taisnier, and Peregrinus propose, but by mixing elements;

imitate thunder, like Salmoneus, snow, hail, and the ebb and flow of the sea; give life to creatures, so they say, without reproduction—and what else besides? Pedro Nunes of Alcácer do Sal and Kepler undertake to demonstrate that no atmospheric phenomena, clouds, fogs, or vapours rise higher than fifty or eighty miles, and that all the rest is pure air or the element of fire.

Cardan, Tycho, and Jean Pena plainly refute this by refraction and many other arguments: there is no such element of fire at all. If, as Tycho proves, the moon is fifty or sixty earth radii away from us, and if, as Pedro Nunes maintains, the air occupies so narrow a space,

what proportion is there between it and the other three elements? What purpose does it serve? Is it full of spirits dwelling there, as the Paracelsians and Platonists hold—the higher, the nobler? Is it full of birds, or a mere vacuum serving no purpose?

Tycho Brahe and Christoph Rothmann, mathematician to the Landgrave of Hesse, debate at length in their Astronomical Letters whether the air and the heavens have the same “transparent medium,” the same transparency and matter, or are two distinct substances.

Christoph Rothmann, Jean Pena, Giordano Bruno, and many other recent mathematicians maintain that it is the same: one substance throughout, becoming ever purer and finer the higher it rises. They say this is found by experience on the tops of certain mountains in America: if someone climbs up, he immediately faints for lack of denser air to cool the heart.

Acosta, in book 3, chapter 9, calls this mountain Pariacaca, in Peru. It makes those who climb it retch and vomit, he says, as do other mountains of the Andes in the deserts of Chile for five hundred miles together; and through the extreme cold they lose their fingers and toes.