And I believe that they were moved by the fable of Phaeton, which Ovid relates in the beginning of the second part of his Metamorphoses.

Others said, such as Anaxagoras and Democritus, that it was the light of the Sun reflected into that part.

And these opinions, with demonstrative reasons, they proved over and over again.

What Aristotle may have said of this is not so easy to learn, because his opinion is not found to be the same in one translation as in the other; and I believe that it might be due to the error of the translators, for in the new one he seems to say that the Galaxy is a collection of vapours under the stars of that part which always attract them; and this does not seem to be the true reason.

In the old translation he says that the Galaxy is no other than a multitude of fixed stars in that part, so small that we cannot distinguish them from here below, but that they cause the whiteness which we call the Milky Way.