The Summary of Physics Restored

27So that nothing might be lacking to so great a work, long ago delineated in the divine mind, the same spirit drove away the condensed darkness and the opposing shadow slipping beneath it with a fiery, flashing sword, and thrust them into the centre of the abyss. Thus the last space of the heavens was made open to light, which we rightly call air, or the lower heaven; then the third day shone forth. The darkness that had overshadowed the whole face of the abyss in the beginning, pressed down for three days into the lowest region by the incoming light, was so condensed by the narrowness of the space and the contraction of cold that it passed into the nature and immense mass of water. In the midst of the waters the kernel and centre of the whole fabric was poised and fixed, formed from the dregs and thicker matter of the abyss into a solid, opaque body of earth, like a valley and tomb of darkness. Afterwards, at the spirit's impulse, the waters withdrew from the face of the earth and rolled around its sides; dry land appeared, to bring forth almost countless kinds of plants, offer a dwelling to so many species of animals, and especially to the human being ruling over the rest. It was to provide them with food and humankind with an ample furnishing of things. Earth and water thus ended in one globe, whose opacity or shadow, due to its density and imaging the dark abyss, continually occupies and envelops all the neighbouring air opposite the sun. For, facing away, it retreats from the pursuing light at an equal distance, and

27.2like one slipping away, forever fugitive it withdraws.