“The earth is a living body. Its soul is its ability to grow. This soul, which also provides the earth with its bodily warmth, is located in the inner fires of the earth, which emerge at several places as baths, sulfur mines or volcanoes. Its flesh is the soil, its bones are the strata of rock, its cartilage is the tufa [rock composed of volcanic detritus, fused together by heat], its blood is the underground streams, the reservoir of blood around its heart is the ocean. The systole and diastole of the blood in the arteries and veins appear on the earth as the rising and sinking of the oceans.” (The Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci)