CHAPTER IIL

Concerning the Field, the Roots* and the Tkees of Minerals.
The Most High created the element of water to be, as it w^ere, a field in which the roots of mineral trees, springing forth from their seeds, should be fixed, and thence the trunk and the branches should be thrust forth over the earth. He separated it, therefore, from the other three, so that neither in the air, nor in the earth, nor in heaven, but placed on the lower globe, it should exist by itself as a free body» to be on the earth and to have its centre there where it was founded, created after such an admirable order that it should bear man upon it like the earth ; so that man borne in a ship should speed over the water and get possession o( it. What is more marvellous still is that though it surrounds our globe in every direction, the water does not fall down from its own limits, though the part at our antipodes seems to hang downwards, just as our part seems to them, and yet each remains spread out a plane surface on its own sphere, wherever you look at it, as if some pit should be imagined which, descending perpendicularly to the abyss, should find no bottom nor be sustained by the earth. It is even more wonderful than the ^gg in its shell, provided with all that it requires. The generations of minerals, then, from the element of water are protruded into the earth, just as from the element of earth all fruits are pushed forward into the air, so that nothing but the root remains in the earth. Exactly so, all metals, salt^ gems, stones, talc, marcasites, sulphurs, and every similar substance, pass from their mother, the water, to another mother, namely, the earth, in which the operation of their trees is perfected, while their roots are fixed in the water. For as those things which grow from roots in the earth are finished in the air, in like manner, those which derive their origin from the water are altogether completed by Nature in the earth, so that they reach, as the others did, their ultimate matter. The
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ancients, led astray by this opinion, because they saw that metals were found in the earth, were so little advanced that they did not see their error wheat on the subject of minerals, they wrote that out of the earth grew nothingf but wood, leaves, flowers, fruits, and herbs, and that everything else was produced from water. No less mythical was the saying of that man who asserted that a!l things which were produced ow the earth had their origin from the air, because they are in the air and are perfected there, though he saw their roots in the earth. Because he did not see the roots of minerals with his bodily eyes he would even feign that they are fixed In the earth. Such is the physical science of the Greeks, deduced only from what is seen, recognising nothing occult by mental experiment. It is just a fiction of lazy men who presume to chatter about natural science from eyesight alone ; and who do not experiment so as to observe those occult things u^hich underlie the things which are manifest* the one over against the other.