COSMOGRAPHIAE

Now, while we understand that its continuous and truly astonishing motion inclines toward the direction in which the Sun is driven by its own motion, we shall divide it with certain marks, so clearly and perspicuously that the whole reason of it can be understood with little effort, even by those who have never heard anything about these matters, or even by the illiterate and the completely ignorant.

Let us therefore place before our eyes some globe and imagine it being turned in some direction. For example, if I were to hold a globe as if hanging in the air with my thumb and index finger, and you were to turn it within my fingers, while those fingers remained unmoved, would you not affirm that those points that were under my fingers were fixed and immovable—that is, stable in the same place?

But if you were to draw a line equally distant from those two set points, the globe would undoubtedly be divided into two equal parts by such a line.

Furthermore, if you were to draw two other lines around the globe, from one side and another of the line we just spoke of, yet at an equal interval distant from it, would not the interval comprehended within these lines be like a Zone, by which the entire globe would be indicated as being girded and surrounded?

The same

Vocabulary: Cosmography, globe, motion, Sun, zone, points