Chapter XXXII

OF THE YEAR, AND HOW MANY CIRCULATIONS MAKE UP THE GREAT YEAR OF EVERY PLANET.

The year of Saturn is completed when he has had his circulation in the space of thirty solar years; of Jupiter in twelve; of Mars in two, of the sun in twelve months; in so many Mercury and Venus, the spaces of their circulation being equal; of the moon in thirty days, in which time her course from her prime to her conjunction is finished. As to the great year, some make it to consist of eight years solar, some of nineteen, others of fifty-nine. Heraclitus, of eighteen thousand. Diogenes, of three hundred and sixty-five such years as Heraclitus assigns. Others there are who lengthen it to seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven years.

BOOK III.

In my two precedent treatises having in due order taken a compendious view and given an account of the celestial bodies, and of the moon which divides between them and the terrestrial, I must now convert my pen to discourse in this third book of Meteors, which are beings above the earth and below the moon, and are extended to the site and position of the earth, which is supposed to be the centre of the sphere of this world; and from thence will I take my beginning.