[2] According to Cicero, and his commentator, Macrobius, the lunar tone is
the gravest and faintest on the planetary heptachord.
[3] Leucippus, the atomist, imagined a kind of vortices in the heavens,
which he borrowed from Anaxagoras, and possibly suggested to Descartes.
[4] Heraclides, upon the allegories of Homer, conjectures that the idea of
the harmony of the spheres originated with this poet, who, in representing
the solar beams as arrows, supposes them to emit a peculiar sound in the
air.
[5] In the account of Africa which D'Ablancourt has translated, there is
mention of a tree in that country, whose branches, when shaken by the hand
produce very sweet sounds.
[6] Alluding to the extinction, or at least the disappearance, of some of
those fixed stars, which we are taught to consider as suns, attended each
by its system. Descartes thought that our earth might formerly have been a
sun, which became obscured by a thick incrustation over its surface. This
probably suggested the idea of a central fire.
[7] This musical river is mentioned in the romance of Achilles Tatius.
[8] Orpheus.
[9] Eratosthenes, in mentioning the extreme veneration of Orpheus for
Apollo, says that he was accustomed to go to the Pangaean mountain at
daybreak, and there wait the rising of the sun, that he might be the first
to hail its beams.
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