of fire at all.  If, as Tycho proves, the moon be distant from us fifty and sixty semi-diameters of the earth:  and as Peter Nonius will have it, the air be so angust, what proportion is there betwixt the other three elements and it?  To what use serves it?  Is it full of spirits which inhabit it, as the Paracelsians and Platonists hold, the higher the more noble, [3082]full of birds, or a mere vacuum to no purpose?  It is much controverted between Tycho Brahe and Christopher Rotman, the landgrave of Hesse’s mathematician, in their astronomical epistles, whether it be the same Diaphanum clearness, matter of air and heavens, or two distinct essences?  Christopher Rotman, John Pena, Jordanus Brunus, with many other late mathematicians, contend it is the same and one matter throughout, saving that the higher still the purer it is, and more subtile; as they find by experience in the top of some hills in [3083]America; if a man ascend, he faints instantly for want of thicker air to refrigerate the heart.  Acosta, l. 3. c. 9. calls this mountain Periacaca in Peru; it makes men cast and vomit, he saith, that climb it, as some other of those Andes do in the deserts of Chile for five hundred miles together, and for extremity of cold to lose their fingers and toes.  Tycho will have two distinct matters of heaven and air; but to say truth, with some small qualification, they have one and the self-same opinion about the essence and matter of heavens; that it is not hard and impenetrable, as peripatetics hold, transparent, of a quinta essentia, [3084]"but that it is penetrable and soft as the air itself is, and that the planets move in it, as birds in the air, fishes in the sea.”  This they prove by motion of comets, and otherwise (though Claremontius in his Antitycho stiffly opposes), which are not generated, as Aristotle teacheth, in the aerial region, of a hot and dry exhalation, and so consumed:  but as Anaxagoras and Democritus held of old, of a celestial matter:  and as [3085] Tycho, [3086]Eliseus, Roeslin, Thaddeus, Haggesius, Pena, Rotman, Fracastorius, demonstrate by their progress, parallaxes, refractions, motions of the planets, which interfere and cut one another’s orbs, now higher, and then lower, as [Symbol:  Mars] amongst the rest, which sometimes, as [3087]Kepler confirms by his own, and Tycho’s accurate observations, comes nearer the earth than the [Symbol:  Sun] and is again eftsoons aloft in Jupiter’s orb; and [3088]other sufficient reasons, far above the moon:  exploding in the meantime that element of fire, those fictitious first watery movers, those heavens I mean above the firmament, which Delrio, Lodovicus Imola, Patricius, and many of the fathers affirm; those monstrous orbs of eccentrics, and Eccentre Epicycles deserentes.  Which howsoever Ptolemy, Alhasen, Vitellio, Purbachius, Maginus, Clavius, and many of their associates, stiffly maintain to be real orbs, eccentric, concentric, circles aequant, &c. are absurd and ridiculous.  For who is so mad