52 plint's natueal histoet. [Book II. 



thrown off not losing its divine operation. And this takes 

 place more particularly when the air is in an unsettled state, 

 either because the moisture which is then collected excites 

 the greatest quantity of fire, or because the air is disturbed, 

 as if by the parturition of the pregnant star. 



CHAP. 19. (21.) — OP THE niSTAITCES OF THE STAES. 



Many persons have attempted to discover the distance of 

 thie stars from the earth, and they have published as the 

 result, that the sun is nineteen times as far from the moon, 

 as the moon herself is from the earth\ Pythagoras, who 

 was a man of a very sagacious mind, computed the distance 

 from the earth to the moon to be 126,000 furlongs, that 

 from her to the sun is double this distance, and that it is 

 three times this distance to the twelve signs ^ ; and this was 

 also the opinion of our countryman, Gallus Sulpicius^. 



CHAP. 20. (22.) — OP THE HAEMOirr OP THE STAES. 



Pythagoras, employing the terms that are used in music, 

 sometimes names the distance between the Earth and the 

 Moon a tone ; from her to Mercury he supposes to be half 

 this space, and about the same from liim to Venus. Erom 

 her to the Sun is a tone and a half; from the Sun to Mars is 

 a tone, the same as from the Earth to the Moon ; from him 

 there is half a tone to Jupiter, from Jupiter to Saturn also 



1 Alexandre remarks, tliat Pliny mentions tliis, not as his own opinion, 

 but that of many persons ; for, in chap. 21, he attempts to prove mathe- 

 matically, that the moon is situated at an equal distance between the sim. 

 and the earth ; Lemaire, ii. 286. 



2 Marcus remarks upon the inconsistency between the account here 

 given of Pythagoras' s opinion, and what is generally supposed to have 

 been his theory of the planetary system, according to which the sun, and 

 not the earth, is placed ia the centre ; Enfield's Philosophy, i. 288, 289. 

 Yet we find that Plato, and many others among the ancients, give us the 

 same accotmt of Pythagoras's doctrine of the respective distances of the 

 heavenly bodies; Ajasson, ii. 374. Plato in his Timseus, 9. p. 312-315, 

 details the comphcated arrangement which he supposes to constitute the 

 proportionate distances of the planetary bodies. 



3 Sulpicius has abeady been mentioned, in the ninth chapter of this 

 book, as being the first among the Eomans who gave a popular explana- 

 tion of the cause of ecUpses. 



