… have1 been pouring through the summits of the Armenian mountains, and you can believe that all2 the water of the Ocean must have passed very many times through their mouths.  Now, will you not believe that the Nile has spilled more water into the sea than there is presently3 in the entire element of water? Certainly so.  And if this water had fallen away from the body of the earth, this machine4 would already have been without water long ago.  One may certainly conclude that the water goes from the rivers to the sea and from the sea to the rivers, ever thus circling again and turning around, and that the whole of the sea and the rivers has passed through the mouth of the Nile an infinity of times.5

Proof of how the surface of the sea6 is equidistant from the center of the earth and is the lowest surface of the world.

The lowest parts of the mountains are where they conjoin with their valleys, and the very lowest parts of the valleys are their rivers, the causes of these valleys.  And these rivers find their ultimate lowness in their concourse7 to the real river, where, losing form, they lose their name.  And the ultimate lowness of the real rivers is the sea, where the peregrinating rivers rest8 with their followers.

On the blood at the top of the head.

It would appear to be so, because of a simple one,9 that when someone breaks the top of a man's head, what comes out is none other than that blood that is found between his lips.  Since every weighty thing seeks low places, and blood has weight, it appears impossible for it to rise upward of itself, like a light and airy thing.  And if you wanted to say that the expansions10 that the lung makes in its lake of blood — when the lung fills itself with air in the gathering of the breath, or deflates, driving the blood of the lake fleeing through the veins — that those are what cause the increasing and the inflating, and that this inflation causes the blood to escape from the above-mentioned break at the top of the head, then this opinion is quickly reproved, since the veins are well capable and suited to accommodate the increasing of the blood, without its having to overflow through the break in the head, as it would if they could support receiving but little.

Why this blood escapes through the top of the head.

The spiritual parts have the power to move and accompany11 materials with their course.

We see that fire, by means of its spiritual heat, sends up through the chimney, as a vaporing smokiness, material12 that is terrestrial and weighty, as is seen in the soot you see returning into ashes when you burn.  Thus, the heat that is mixed in with the blood, finding that it can evaporate through the break in the head and desiring to return to its element, bears in company with itself the blood with which this heat13 is infused and mixed.  The reason that the smoke rises upwards with such fury and carries earthen matter with it, is that the fire that attaches onto the wood nourishes and feeds itself on a fine moisture.  But the coarser moisture cannot be consumed by the heat14 of the fire found therein, so the fire, …415