The Creation

¹¹ In the beginning**, from the surging and fusion of fluid through light or heat, innumerable bubbles were born, varying in magnitude and thickness.

For whenever subtle things attempt to break through dense things, and there is something that resists, they:

• are formed into certain hollow bubbles
• gain an internal motion of parts

Consequently, they gain a consistency or cohesion (through our Theory of Motion).

This specifically from those first abstract principles.

The same is evident from glass-making workshops, where from circular motion and the straight spirit of fire, glasses—the simplest kind of artificial things—are prepared.

Similarly, from the circular motion of the earth and the straight [action] of light, bubbles were born.

¹² These bubbles are:

• the “seeds of things”
• the filaments of species
• the receptacles of aether
• the basis of bodies
• the cause of consistency
• the foundation of various things of such great impetus as we admire in motions.

If these were absent, all things would be like sand without lime.

By the gyration of dense things, the aether would fly away and be expelled, leaving our earth dead and condemned.

On the contrary, by the bubbles—strengthened by gyration around their own center—all things are solidified and held together.

This is also why:

• arched things prevail in strength
• round glasses subsist in elastic experiments, while those of another figure are shattered.

¹³ All water is a heap of innumerable bubbles. Air is nothing but subtle water.

I distinguish air in this way from aether:

• air is heavy (gravis)
• aether, through its circulation, is the cause of gravity

Hence, the air and whatever floats in it—such as clouds and projectiles—are rotated with the earth just as water is with a vessel.

Even the sea, with its shores not closed off, includes the earth rather than being included by it along with the bottom.

Although some retardation or motion in the contrary direction is not lacking, from which, with the strongest commotion of the Ocean occurring under the tropics—through rarefaction, attraction, and solar light—the water follows the motion against the earth more easily than the earth itself because it is lighter.

The same is repeated several times daily, for water once scattered by a clash needs space to collect itself back into a heap.

There is the dash of the Ocean on the shore of America nearest to us and other particular dashes and absorptions.

Then, the Moon, when it shines with full light, makes the air beneath it lighter and less pressing through rarefaction.

• The water, therefore, swells beneath it.

Conversely, when the Moon is new, the air beneath its darkness is denser and more pressing.

• So it causes the water to swell toward the shores.

Finally, in the equinoxes, the direct opposition of the motion of light or aether to the motion of the earth (for then the source of light or the solar optical motion is at the equator) sharpens all things depending on the motion of the aether.

…with current causes, daily tides, at the new and full moons (by the same effect of contrary causes), but especially at the equinoxes, are increased by universal and particular currents.

Finally, the phenomena of fixed winds and other ordinary motions of water and air are not difficult to deduce.

I do not number Fire here, for flame is only an ignited exhalation.

• A spark is ignited soot.
• Fire itself is just a collection of aether and air breaking out and exploding.

¹⁴ But the Earth consists entirely of bubbles.

For the basis of the earth is Glass (Vitrum), and Glass is a dense bubble.

It is established by fluxion—that is, collected from the aether by a surging, or by fire stirring itself by insinuating into things—and lastly by its exit, its end and nature being vitrification.

What wonder is it, then, if the terrestrial globe—transformed and made flowing by the action of light—has passed from dense or terrestrial things into glass, and water and air into thinner bubbles?

Nor was there then, as in a homogeneous state when things were not yet firm, a need for that force in changing which is now required in a system constituted against the torrent.

Since in a free or natural state, things are moved easily by however small a force, whereas in the present systematic and, so to speak, civil state, they are not moved unless by things proportioned to the sense.