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twenty degrees. An unhealthy change of seasons commenced, and life-spans
declined to the currently prescribed three score years and ten.
If this reconstruction strikes modern readers as fanciful and scripture-
burdened (I do not deny it, but only urge different criteria of judgment),
recall Burnet's commitment to a rational explanation based on natural laws.
We might contrast Burnet's account of the change in axial tilt with the words
of a celebrated near-contemporary who did not shrink from attributing the
work directly to angels:
Some say he bid his angels turn askance
The poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more
From the sun's axle; they with labor pushed
Oblique the centric globe: some say the sun
Was bid turn reins from the equinoctial road
Like distant breadth to Taurus with the seven
Atlantic Sisters, and the Spartan Twins,
Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amain
By Leo and the Virgin and the Scales,
As deep as Capricorn, to bring in change
Of seasons to each clime; else had the spring
Perpetual smiled on Earth with vernant flowers,
Equal in days and nights,. . .
The sun, as from Thyestean banquet, turned
His course intended; else how had the World
Inhabited, though sinless, more than now
Avoided pinching cold and scorching heat?
Milton, Paradise Lost
In Book III Burnet presents a set of arguments, guided more by scripture
since physics treats pasts more securely than futures, for
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