For the two lines of shells it must be said that the earth, out of scorn, plunged beneath the sea and made the first layer; then the flood made the second.

Contra. — Because nature did not ordain that one animal should not live off the death of another.

Pro. — Nature, being desirous and taking pleasure in creating and making continual lives and forms, because she knows that they are an increase of her terrestrial matter, is more willing and prompt in her creating than time is in its consuming; and therefore she has ordained that many animals be food one for another. And this not satisfying such a desire, she often sends forth certain poisoned and pestilent vapours and continual plague upon the great multiplications and congregations of animals, and above all upon men, who make great increase, because other animals do not feed on them; and the causes being removed, the effects will fail.

Contra. — Then this earth seeks to fail of its life, desiring the continual multiplication, by the reason you have set forth. Often the effects resemble their causes. Animals are an example of the life of the world.

Pro. — Now see the hope and desire of returning to one's homeland, or of returning to the first chaos: it does as the moth to the light, as the man who with continual desires always awaits with festivity the new spring, always the new summer, always the new months and new years, it seeming to him that the desired things come too late; and he does not perceive that he desires his own undoing. But this desire is that quintessence, spirit of the elements, which, finding itself shut up as the soul of the human body, always desires to return to its sender. And I would have this same desire understood to be in that quintessence, companion of nature, and man is a model of the world.

Like a whirling wind that runs through a sandy and hollowed valley, which by its swift course drives to its centre all the things that oppose its furious course.

Not otherwise does the northern aquilone (north wind) strike back with its tempest.

The tempestuous sea does not make so great a roar, when the northern aquilone strikes it back with foaming waves between Scylla and Charybdis; nor Stromboli or Mongibello (Etna), when the sulphurous flames, being shut in, by force breaking and opening the great mountain, hurl through the air rock and earth together with the issuing and vomited flame.

Nor when the fiery caverns of Mongibello give back the ill-held element, revomiting and thrusting it back to its region with fury, driving before it whatever obstacle interposes itself to its impetuous fury.

And drawn by my eager longing, wishing to see the great abundance of the various and strange forms made by artful nature, having wandered a while among the shadowy rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern; before which, remaining a while stupefied and ignorant of such a thing, I bent my back into an arch and, resting my tired hand upon my knee, with the right hand I made shade over my lowered and closed brows; and often bending this way and that to see whether within I could discern anything, this being denied me by the great darkness that was in there. And having stood a while, suddenly two things arose in me: fear and desire — fear of the threatening and dark cavern, desire to see whether within there were some miraculous thing.