2 THEORY OF THE FIRMAMENT. 



found here among us, (we are speaking of those bodies 

 that are simple and perfect, not of such as are compounded 

 and imperfectly mixed,) are clearly those two bodies, air 

 and flame. But these are to be propounded as bodies 

 utterly heterogeneous, not, as is commonly supposed, that 

 flame is nothing else than air set on fire. To these cor 

 respond, in the higher regions, the setherial and sidereal 

 nature, as, in the inferior, water and oil, and in the still 

 deeper parts, mercury and sulphur, and generally crude 

 and fat bodies, or, in other words, bodies that have a 

 repugnance to, and such as are susceptible of, flame ; (for 

 salts are of a compounded nature, consisting of crude 

 and at the same time also of inflammable parts). It is 

 now to be seen by what compact these two great families 

 of things, air and flame, shall have occupied by far the 

 greater part of the universe, and what are those parts they 

 hold in the system. In air nearest to the earth, flame 

 lives but a momentary life, and utterly perishes. But 

 after the air has begun to be more depurate from the 

 effhiviae of the earth and well rarified, the nature of 

 flame through various* adventures explores its way, and 

 tries to take its station in the air, and after a time ac 

 quires some duration, not from succession, as with us, 

 but in identity ; t which takes place for a time in some of 

 the feebler comets, which are in a manner of an inter 

 mediate nature between a successive and a fixed flame ; the 

 flamy nature however is not fixed or established, before its 

 arrival at the body of the moon. There the flame lays 

 down its extinguishable part, and protects itself on all 

 sides, but yet it is a flame, weak without vigour, and 

 having little of radiation of that kind ; that is, neither 

 vivid from its own nature, nor much excited by a contrary 

 one ; neither is it sincere, but, from its composition with an 

 etherial substance, such as is there met with, it is stained 

 and mixed up. And in the region of Mercury flame has 

 not very plentifully established itself, since, by the accu 

 mulation of its whole amount, it is able to form only a 

 small planet, and that withal labouring and struggling, like 

 an ignis fatuus, with a great and highly disturbed diversity 



* Per varies casus, per tot discrimina rerum, Virg. JEn. iii. 208. Per 

 varies casus tentat et experitur, may be translated after various adventurous 

 efforts tries, or, adventurous through many casualties tries. 



t Identitus : quaevis actio repetita. 



