with curiosity what kind of brood must be in it, what kind of life, if there be any life there, between orbs which all but touch each other two and two, where not even
but where there is scarcely a chink of a nail's-breadth all round.
Do indeed the astrologers rightly ascribe to Saturn the guardianship of miners, who, accustomed to spend their lives, like moles, underground, seldom breathe the free air under the open sky? Although the darkness here is rather more supportable than in Saturn, because the sun, which appears there only as large as Venus appears to us on the earth, continually casts its rays through the spaces between the different orbs in such a way that those inhabitants who are situated on one orb are covered by the other as by a ceiling; while those on the latter orb, on the top of this roof of theirs, exposed as it is to the full light of the sun, receive a glare as if from very firebrands. But I must draw in the reins and check my mind in its enjoyment of the free fields of ether; for fear, perchance, later observations should report something
- ↑ Virgil, Eclog. iii. 105.
