OR COSMOGRAPHY.

...gradually losing the ratios of the meridional shadows. Thus, either 24 parallels, each corresponding to half-hour increments, or 36, each to third-hour increments, or 48, each to quarter-hour increments, ought to be posited.

On fixing or positioning the heavens upon the earth.

Ancient philosophy imagined a great human figure with his face turned to the East, his back to the West, his right hand pointing to the southern pole, and his left to the northern, by which they wished the universe to be divided into four quarters. The poles always remain fixed. However, risings and settings are uncertain, nor can they be established due to the constant motion of the heavens. Therefore, they are limits relative to something. For one cannot speak of a certain rising or setting unless one has linked it to this or that population. Divine providence, however, has wonderfully given us in our times a most certain argument for fixing the heavens. For the needle of an hourly quadrant, touched by a magnet, suggests to us that the first meridian is at the end of Africa and Europe (which I wish to be called Chamesia and Iapetia), such that it shows itself to be subjected to the meridian line only in that place. God pushed the unsuspecting Ptolemaeus Ptolemy and Abilfe-deã Ismail Abu al-Fida, the cosmographers, to this task, so that they might show that what they had established in this regard was confirmed in the heavens, namely, guided by the prophetic books of the ancients, of Abraham and the descendants of Noah or the Chaldeans. Therefore, God placed the sun over the meridian of the Moluccas, where the East of eastern Syria is, and the terrestrial Paradise, and the greatest happiness of the earthly globe.