52 
plikt's katueal history. 
[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.) — or THE DISTANCES OE THE STABS. 
Many persons have attempted to discover the distance of 
thje 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 earths 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.) — OE THE HABMONT OE THE STABS. 
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 him to Venus. Prom 
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 
^ Alexandre remarks, that Pliny mentions this, 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 sun 
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 in the centre ; Enfield's Philosophyj i. 288, 289. 
Yet we find that Plato, and many others among the ancients, give us the 
same accoimt of Pythagoras' s doctrine of the respective distances of the 
heavenly bodies; Ajasson, ii. 374. Plato in his Timaeus, 9. p. 312-315, 
details the comphcated arrangement which he supposes to constitute the 
proportionate (hstances of the planetary bodies. 
3 Sulpicius has already 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 echpses. ' 
