The Various and Ingenious Machines

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in the presence of King Hierone Hiero, he alone pulled a very heavy ship to land, and from land pulled the Royal Alexandrian ship back to the sea; he fabricated that celestial Globe, that is, the divine Sphere of simple glass, with the seven courses of the wandering stars, or with ineffable artifice one could see their distance, height, and lowness. All of which he did with the sole faculty of the excellent Mathematics, by virtue of which he labored so much through the means of his most stupendous machines against the great Roman Marcello Marcellus in the siege of Siragusa Syracuse, or rather he became so confident in this art that he dared to let escape from his mouth that tremendous voice, in every way contrary to the law of nature:

Give me a place where I may stand, and I will move the earth.

The same is read of Archita Archytas, who was worth so much in this most celebrated discipline that he made a dove of wood, which flew and sustained itself in the air as if it were alive. Who will ever be able, then, to decorate in such clear style and adorn with glorious praise the merits of this sublime science, so that he might reach the heap of its supreme rewards? These are the egregious disciplines, without which (as pleased the divine Platone Plato) the human intellect does not escape from baseness; and with their guidance, it elevates itself to the contemplation of the celestial and divine things. Hence the ancient and grave Egyptians, if not from the students of these sciences, did not wish to elect the priests who would administer their Religion: and then from the consort of their priests they chose a King who would rule and govern them worthily. Which custom the Persians observed almost in conformity to them, who did not admit to their dominion any King who was not very well versed in the Magical discipline. Because truly (as Agostin santo Saint Augustine affirms in the second book of Christian Doctrine) this most noble faculty of the Mathematics is infinitely necessary to the cognition and intelligence of the Scritture sacre Holy Scriptures, being that through the ignorance of numbers, many places of the divine letters have been foolishly interpreted and understood by many. And of this opinion was also the purple-clad Girolamo Jerome, who moved himself for this reason to write in the first of his Epistles of the great force that numbers have in interpreting the sacred Scriptures. Which, knowing the most learned...