to think that there should be so many circles, like subordinate wheels in a clock, all impenetrable and hard, as they feign, add and subtract at their pleasure. [3089]Maginus makes eleven heavens, subdivided into their orbs and circles, and all too little to serve those particular appearances:  Fracastorius, seventy-two homocentrics; Tycho Brahe, Nicholas Ramerus, Heliseus Roeslin, have peculiar hypotheses of their own inventions; and they be but inventions, as most of them acknowledge, as we admit of equators, tropics, colures, circles arctic and antarctic, for doctrine’s sake (though Ramus thinks them all unnecessary), they will have them supposed only for method and order.  Tycho hath feigned I know not how many subdivisions of epicycles in epicycles, &c., to calculate and express the moon’s motion:  but when all is done, as a supposition, and no otherwise; not (as he holds) hard, impenetrable, subtile, transparent, &c., or making music, as Pythagoras maintained of old, and Robert Constantine of late, but still, quiet, liquid, open, &c.

If the heavens then be penetrable, as these men deliver, and no lets, it were not amiss in this aerial progress, to make wings and fly up, which that Turk in Busbequius made his fellow-citizens in Constantinople believe he would perform:  and some new-fangled wits, methinks, should some time or other find out:  or if that may not be, yet with a Galileo’s glass, or Icaromenippus’ wings in Lucian, command the spheres and heavens, and see what is done amongst them.  Whether there be generation and corruption, as some think, by reason of ethereal comets, that in Cassiopea, 1572, that in Cygno, 1600, that in Sagittarius, 1604, and many like, which by no means Jul.  Caesar la Galla, that Italian philosopher, in his physical disputation with Galileis de phenomenis in orbe lunae, cap. 9. will admit:  or that they were created ab initio, and show themselves at set times. and as [3090]Helisaeus Roeslin contends, have poles, axle-trees, circles of their own, and regular motions.  For, non pereunt, sed minuuntur et disparent, [3091]Blancanus holds they come and go by fits, casting their tails still from the sun:  some of them, as a burning-glass, projects the sunbeams from it; though not always neither:  for sometimes a comet casts his tail from Venus, as Tycho observes.  And as [3092]Helisaeus Roeslin of some others, from the moon, with little stars about them ad stuporem astronomorum; cum multis aliis in coelo miraculis, all which argue with those Medicean, Austrian, and Burbonian stars, that the heaven of the planets is indistinct, pure, and open, in which the planets move certis legibus ac metis.  Examine likewise, An coelum sit coloratum?  Whether the stars be of that bigness, distance, as astronomers relate, so many in [3093]number, 1026, or 1725, as J. Bayerus; or as some Rabbins, 29,000 myriads; or as Galileo discovers by his glasses, infinite, and that via lactea, a confused light of small