Note 846 — Chapter VIII · THE WATERS

Livre du trésor, I, 35, 36, 39, as cited by Boffito, Intorno alla “Quaestio de aqua et terra,” Memoria I, La controversia, 1902, pp. 113–114.

The fact that the waters do not completely cover the lands also had puzzled the Moslems, who anticipated Robert Grosseteste in ascribing this apparent reversal of the normal operation of the laws of nature to God’s wish to preserve a dry area whereon man and animals might thrive. Averroës had given a more proximate cause, maintaining that the stars are more numerous in the northern hemisphere than in the southern and that through their attraction of the land, as well as through the evaporative power of their heat and of that of the sun, the lands were uncovered. On the theory of eccentric spheres of earth and water see Kretschmer, Phys. Erdk., 1889, pp. 67–74; Norlind, Problem, 1918, pp. 48–54; and more especially Boffito’s elaborate discussion of the history of this theory and of ancient, Arabic, and Christian doctrines of the relations of land and water in general (Boffito, op. cit.). For the theory as developed in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries see Wisotzki, Zeitströmungen, 1897, pp. 39–57. The matter was discussed in a small treatise, Quaestio de aqua et terra, which has been attributed to Dante but is of doubtful authenticity (see above, p. 410, note 98). This is an argument against the possibility of eccentric spheres; the “emergent land” of 438the northern hemisphere is ascribed to the attractive force of the stars of that hemisphere.