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Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.

Their diurnal motion is nearly the same, the obliquity of their respective ecliptics not very different; of all the superior planets the distance of Mars from the sun is by far the nearest, alike to that of the earth; nor will the length of the Martial year appear very different from what we enjoy when compared to the surprising duration of the years of Jupiter, Saturn and the Georgian Sidus.

Now, up to this moment, Saunders knew no more, than those who had just been questioning him of the particular situation of the ship, in which he floated as indifferent to the whereabouts and the winds, as men sail in the earth along its orbit, without bethinking them of parallaxes, nodes, ecliptics, and solstices.

Though the satellites of the moons revolve about the primaries in orbits inclined at all kinds of angles to the planes of the ecliptics, and even the moons vary in their paths about the planets, the planets themselves revolve about the stars, like those of this system about the sun, in substantially the same plane; and what is true of the planets is even more true of the stars in their orbits about Cosmos, so that when, after incalculable ages, they do fall, they strike this monster sun at or near its equator, and not falling perpendicularly, but in a line varying but slightly from a tangent, and at terrific speed, they cause the colossus to rotate more and more rapidly on its own axis, till it must become greatly flattened at the poles, as the earth is slightly, and as Jupiter and Saturn are a good deal.

"Try the test I told thee of, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and don't mind any other, for thou knowest nothing about colures, lines, parallels, zodiacs, ecliptics, poles, solstices, equinoxes, planets, signs, bearings, the measures of which the celestial and terrestrial spheres are composed; if thou wert acquainted with all these things, or any portion of them, thou wouldst see clearly how many parallels we have cut, what signs we have seen, and what constellations we have left behind and are now leaving behind.

"Try the test I told thee of, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and don't mind any other, for thou knowest nothing about colures, lines, parallels, zodiacs, ecliptics, poles, solstices, equinoxes, planets, signs, bearings, the measures of which the celestial and terrestrial spheres are composed; if thou wert acquainted with all these things, or any portion of them, thou wouldst see clearly how many parallels we have cut, what signs we have seen, and what constellations we have left behind and are now leaving behind.

Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks and stars, ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.