Chapter CI: Preface: In this book, as it were in a brief outline we have

commented on certain causes in the heavens, and the sites of the lands, and the spaces of the sea, so that the reader may run them over in a little time, and learn their etymologies and causes with compendious brevity.

Chapter 1. On the universe.

1. The universe is the heavens, the earth, the sea, and what in them is the work of God, of whom it is said: “And the universe was made by him”. The universe (_mundus_) is so named in Latin by the philosophers because it is in continued motion (_motu_), as for example, the heavens, the sun, moon, air, seas. For no rest is permitted to its elements, and therefore it is always in motion.

2. Whence also the elements seem to Varro living creatures, since, he says, they move of themselves. The Greeks have borrowed a name for the universe from ornament, on account of the variety of the elements and the beauty of the stars. For it is called among them κόσμος, which means ornament. For with the eyes of the flesh we see nothing fairer than the universe.

3. It is agreed that there are four _climata_, that is, tracts of the universe: East, West, North, South.