Book IV chapter 11

Cardan's error when he seeks the distance of the centre of the earth from the centre of the cosmos¹ by the motion of the stone of Hercules; in his book 5, On Proportions.

O ne may very easily fall into mistakes and errors when one is searching into the hidden causes of things, in the absence of real experiments, and this is easily apparent from the crass² error of Cardan; who deems himself to have discovered the distances of the centres of the cosmos and of the earth through a variation of the magnetick iron of 9 degrees. For he reckoned that everywhere on the earth the point of variation on the Horizon is always distant nine degrees from the true north, toward the east: and from thence he forms, by a most foolish error, his demonstrative ratio of the separate centres.

1 cosmos   

n.宇宙；秩序，和谐

参考例句：

• Our world is but a small part of the cosmos.我们的世界仅仅是宇宙的一小部分而已。
• Is there any other intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos?在宇宙的其他星球上还存在别的有智慧的生物吗？

2 crass   

adj.愚钝的，粗糙的；彻底的

参考例句：

• The government has behaved with crass insensitivity.该政府行事愚蠢而且麻木不仁。
• I didn't want any part of this silly reception,It was all so crass.我完全不想参加这个无聊的欢迎会，它实在太糟糕了。