On the Apparent Magnitude of the Sun when Low and High

and the rest of the external parts covered by its own skin. Think also besides about the internal parts: the mouth, by which it takes in food; the stomach, by which it digests it; the intestines, and the small opening by which it voids waste; the membranes, the muscles, the firmer tissues, and other parts nourished by useful food; the liver, or that which Aristotle calls its equivalent original: "analogum", and likewise the veins, or channels, through which the nourishment is sent; the heart, or the organ for processing the vital spirits: the subtle substances believed to sustain life and heat within the blood, along with the arteries, or passages, through which they are spread: the brain, or that part in which the animal spirits: the refined matter thought to transmit sensation and motion through the nerves are created, and at the same time the nerves, which carry them; then the spirits themselves, and the soul poured through the whole body; if indeed the soul is something distinct from the finest part original: "flore" of the spirits. Think, I say, of all these parts, because without all of them, whatever is nourished, lives, feels, imagines, or moves forward cannot exist; and you will see clearly that nature is able to release, separate, and bind together almost countless myriads of particles to weave together a tiny body: or "corpusculum", which to the naked eye is like a point. Furthermore, since nature cannot continue releasing parts into infinity, but must finally stop at some smallest, indivisible point, this is exactly what most philosophers have called an Atom: from the Greek word for "uncuttable," the smallest possible building block of matter. Therefore, in this sense, one may call "atoms" those smallest and indivisible particles, of which so many myriads can be imagined within a single acarus: a mite, used here as an example of the smallest animal visible to the eye. Now, if you suppose that small membranes are woven from simple atoms, how many, or rather how countless, must be joined together before they reach the thick-