amici? what the sea takes away in one place it adds in another.  Methinks he might rather suspect the sea should in time be filled by land, trees grow up, carcasses, &c. that all-devouring fire, omnia devorans et consumens, will sooner cover and dry up the vast ocean with sand and ashes.  I would examine the true seat of that terrestrial [3033]paradise, and where Ophir was whence Solomon did fetch his gold:  from Peruana, which some suppose, or that Aurea Chersonesus, as Dominicus Niger, Arias Montanus, Goropius, and others will.  I would censure all Pliny’s, Solinus’, Strabo’s, Sir John Mandeville’s, Olaus Magnus’, Marcus Polus’ lies, correct those errors in navigation, reform cosmographical charts, and rectify longitudes, if it were possible; not by the compass, as some dream, with Mark Ridley in his treatise of magnetical bodies, cap. 43. for as Cabeus magnet philos. lib. 3. cap. 4. fully resolves, there is no hope thence, yet I would observe some better means to find them out.

I would have a convenient place to go down with Orpheus, Ulysses, Hercules, [3034]Lucian’s Menippus, at St. Patrick’s purgatory, at Trophonius’ den, Hecla in Iceland, Aetna in Sicily, to descend and see what is done in the bowels of the earth:  do stones and metals grow there still? how come fir trees to be [3035]digged out from tops of hills, as in our mosses, and marshes all over Europe?  How come they to dig up fish bones, shells, beams, ironworks, many fathoms under ground, and anchors in mountains far remote from all seas? [3036]Anno 1460 at Bern in Switzerland 50 fathom deep a ship was digged out of a mountain, where they got metal ore, in which were 48 carcasses of men, with other merchandise.  That such things are ordinarily found in tops of hills, Aristotle insinuates in his meteors, [3037]Pomponius Mela in his first book, c. de Numidia, and familiarly in the Alps, saith [3038]Blancanus the Jesuit, the like is to be seen:  came this from earthquakes, or from Noah’s flood, as Christians suppose, or is there a vicissitude of sea and land, as Anaximenes held of old, the mountains of Thessaly would become seas, and seas again mountains?  The whole world belike should be new moulded, when it seemed good to those all-commanding powers, and turned inside out, as we do haycocks in harvest, top to bottom, or bottom to top:  or as we turn apples to the fire, move the world upon his centre; that which is under the poles now, should be translated to the equinoctial, and that which is under the torrid zone to the circle arctic and antarctic another while, and so be reciprocally warmed by the sun:  or if the worlds be infinite, and every fixed star a sun, with his compassing planets (as Brunus and Campanella conclude) cast three or four worlds into one; or else of one world make three or four new, as it shall seem to them best.  To proceed, if the earth be 21,500 miles in [3039]compass, its diameter is 7,000 from us to our antipodes, and