When Leonardo da Vinci, for example, likened our bodily heat, breath, blood, and bones to the lavas of volcanic eruptions, the effusions of interior air in earthquakes, the emergence of streams from underground springs, and the rocks that build the earth’s framework—and then interpreted these sequences as particular expressions of the four Greek elements of fire, air, water, and earth—he did not view his argument as an excursion into poetry or metaphorical suggestion, but as his best understanding of nature’s actual construction. We now take a more cynical, or at least a more bemused, view of such analogistic reveries—for we recognize that the cosmos, in all its grandness, does not exist for us, or as a mirror of our centrality in the scheme of universal things. That is, we would now freely admit that most attempts to understand such geological or astronomical scales of size and time in terms of comfortable regularities noted in our short life spans or puny dimensions can only represent, in the most flattering interpretation, an honorable “best try”
