fore the elements, having
similar parts and orbicular.

Heraclitus brings in the smallest fragments, and those indivisible.

CHAPTER XIV. OF FIGURES.

A figure is the exterior appearance, the circumscription, and the
boundary of a body.

The Pythagoreans say that the bodies of the four elements are spherical,
fire being in the supremest place only excepted, whose figure is
conical.

CHAPTER XV. OF COLORS.

Color is the visible quality of a body.

The Pythagoreans called color the external appearance of a body.
Empedocles, that which is consentaneous to the passages of the eye.
Plato, that they are fires emitted from bodies, which have parts
harmonious for the sight. Zeno the Stoic, that colors are the first
figurations of matter. The Pythagoreans, that colors are of four sorts,
white and black, red and pale; and they derive the variety of colors
from the mixtures of the elements, and that seen in animals also from
the variety of food and the air.

CHAPTER XVI. OF THE DIVISION OF BODIES.

The disciples of Thales and Pythagoras grant that all bodies are
passible and divisible into infinity. Others hold that atoms and
indivisible parts are there fixed, and admit not of a division into
infinity. Aristotle, that all bodies are potentially but not actually
divisible into infinity.

CHAPTER XVII. HOW BODIES ARE MIXED AND CONTEMPERATED ONE WITH ANOTHER.

The ancient philosophers held that the mixture of elements proceeded
from the alteration of qualities; but the disciples of Anaxagoras
and Democritus say it is done by apposition. Empedocles composes the
elements of still minuter bulks, those which are the most minute and may
be termed the element of elements. Plato assigns three bodies (but he
will not allow these to be elements, nor properly so called), air, fire,
and water, which are mutable into one another; but the earth is mutable
into none of these.

CHAPTER XVIII. OF A VACUUM.

All the natural philosophers from Thales to Plato rejected a vacuum.
Empedocles says that there is nothing of a vacuity in Nature, nor
anything superabundant. Leucippus, Democritus, Demetrius, Metrodorus,
Epicurus, that the atoms are in number infinite; and that a vacuum is
infinite in magnitude. The Stoics, that within the compass of the world
there is no vacuum, but beyond it the vacuum is infinite. Aristotle,
that the vacuum beyond the world is so great that the heaven has liberty
to breathe into it, for t