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THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY
Good Hope] are blackamoors, and yet both alike distant from the equator: nay they that dwell in
the same parallel line with these Negroes, as about the Straits of Magellan, are white coloured,
and yet some in Presbyter John's country in Ethiopia are dun; they in Zeilan and Malabar parallel
with them again black: Manamotapa in Africa, and St. Thomas Isle are extreme hot, both under
the line, coal black their inhabitants, whereas in Peru they are quite opposite in colour, very
temperate, or rather cold, and yet both alike elevated. Moscow in 53. degrees of latitude extreme
cold, as those northern countries usually are, having one perpetual hard frost all winter long; and
in 52. deg. lat. sometimes hard frost and snow all summer, as Button's Bay, &c., or by fits; and
yet England near the same latitude, and Ireland, very moist, warm, and more temperate in winter
than Spain, Italy, or France. Is it the sea that causeth this difference, and the air that comes from
it: Why then is Ister so cold near the Euxine, Pontus, Bithynia, and all Thrace; frigidas regiones
Maginus calls them, and yet their latitude is but 42. which should be hot: Quevira, or Nova
Albion in America, bordering on the sea, was so cold in July, that our Englishmen could hardly
endure it. At Noremberga in 45. lat. all the sea is frozen ice, and yet in a more southern latitude
than ours. New England, and the island of Cambrial Colchos, which that noble gentleman Mr.
Vaughan, or Orpheus junior, describes in his Golden Fleece, is in the same latitude with little
Britain in France, and yet their winter begins not till January, their spring till May; which search
he accounts worthy of an astrologer: is this from the easterly winds, or melting of ice and snow
dissolved within the circle arctic; or that the air being thick, is longer before it be warm by the
sunbeams, and once heated like an oven will keep itself from cold? Our climes breed lice,
Hungary and Ireland male audiunt in this kind; come to the Azores, by a secret virtue of that air
they are instantly consumed, and all our European vermin almost, saith Ortelius. Egypt is
watered with Nilus not far from the sea, and yet there it seldom or never rains: Rhodes, an island
of the same nature, yields not a cloud, and yet our islands ever dropping and inclining to rain.
The Atlantic Ocean is still subject to storms, but in Del Zur, or Mare pacifico, seldom or never
any. Is it from tropic stars, apertio portarum, in the dodecotemories or constellations, the moon's
mansions, such aspects of planets, such winds, or dissolving air, or thick air, which causeth this
and the like differences of heat and cold? Bodin relates of a Portugal ambassador, that coming
from Lisbon to Danzig in Spruce, found greater heat there than at any time at home. Don Garcia
de Sylva, legate to Philip III., king of Spain, residing at Ispahan in Persia, 1619, in his letter to
the Marquess of Bedmar, makes mention of greater cold in Ispahan, whose lat. is 31, than ever
he felt in Spain, or any part of Europe. The torrid zone was by our predecessors held to be
uninhabitable, but by our modern travellers found to be most temperate, bedewed with frequent
rains, and moistening showers, the breeze and cooling blasts in some parts, as Acosta describes,
most pleasant and fertile. Arica in Chile is by report one of the sweetest places that ever the sun
shined on, Olympus terræ, a heaven on earth: how incomparably do some extol Mexico in Nova
Hispania, Peru, Brazil, &c., in some again hard, dry, sandy, barren, a very desert, and still in the
same latitude. Many times we find great diversity of air in the same country, by reason of the site
to seas, hills or dales, want of water, nature of soil, and the like: as in Spain Arragon is aspera et
sicca, harsh and evil inhabited; Estremadura is dry, sandy, barren most part, extreme hot by
reason of his plains; Andalusia another paradise; Valencia a most pleasant air, and continually
green; so is it about Granada, on the one side fertile plains, on the other, continual snow to be
seen all summer long on the hill tops. That their houses in the Alps are three quarters of the year
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