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In English thus: «We sailed so far under the torrid zone towards the east, that we found ourselves under the equinoxíal line, having both the poles at the extremities of our horizon. We passed the line six degrees and quite lost the north-star. We could scarcely perceive the stars of the lesser bear. Desirous to be the discoverer and namer of the pole-star in the other hemisphere, I lost many times my sleep in contemplating the stars in the opposite pole, to discover which of them had least motion. Yet, notwithstanding the troublesome nights I had and the instruments I used, that is to say the quadrant and the astrolabe, I could not perceive any star that had less than ten degrees of motion. So that I had not the satisfaction of naming any one. While I was busying myself in these observations, I remembered a passage in our poet Dante, in the first canto oi Purgatori when feigning to ascend from this hemisphere, he finds himself in the other and describing the anthartic pole says :
«I turned to the right-hand and fixed my eyes in the other pole, where I saw four stars that no person had ever seen but our first parents. The sky smiled with their lustre. Oh! unhappy north that art deprived of beholding them!
«In my judgment the poet in these verses intends by the four stars to describe the pole of the other firmament. And I do not despair but Dante ’s opinion will be found to be true, because I observed four stars in the form of an almond, that had but little motion. And if God gives me life and health, I hope to return lo that hemisphere, and not come back without marking out the pole». —
Although Dante, as appears by his poem, knew as much of astronomy as it was possible to know before the appearance of Galileo and Newton, nevertheless I cannot help thinking it strange, that he should bave any certainty of the constellation of the opposite pole, at a time when we had but slight notions either of the circular or of the oblate figure of this globe, and were not quite sure in our hemisphere of the existence of an opposite one. But it is not without some reason that Lorenzo Giacomini, a learned Tuscan, in a dissertation upon poetical fury,
