CHAP. 19. (21.)-OF THE DISTANCES OR THE STARS.
Many persons have attempted to discover the distance of
the stars from the earth, and they have published as the
result, that the sun is nineteen times as far from the moon,
as the moon herself is from the earth[1]. Pythagoras, who
was a man of a very sagacious mind, computed the distance
from the earth to the moon to be 126,000 furlongs, that
from her to the sun is double this distance, and that it is
three times this distance to the twelve signs[2]; and this was
also the opinion of our countryman, Gallus Sulpicius[3].
1. Alexandre remarks, that Pliny mentions this, not as his own opinion,
but that of many persons; for, in chap. 21, he attempts to prove mathematically, that the moon is situated at an equal distance between the sun
and the earth; Lemaire, ii. 286.
2. Marcus remarks upon the inconsistency between the account here
given of Pythagoras's opinion, and what is generally supposed to have
been his theory of the planetary system, according to which the sun, and
not the earth, is placed in the centre; Enfield's Philosophy, i. 288, 289.
Yet we find that Plato, and many others among the ancients, give us the
same account of Pythagoras's doctrine of the respective distances of the
heavenly bodies; Ajasson, ii. 374. Plato in his Timæus, 9. p. 312–315,
details the complicated arrangement which he supposes to constitute the
proportionate distances of the planetary bodies.
3. Sulpicius has already been mentioned, in the ninth chapter of this
book, as being the first among the Romans who gave a popular
explanation of the cause of eclipses.