Aristotle’s three proofs [of a globe] were:

First. The disappearance of a ship as it sails over the horizon, the hull vanishing first, and the masts and rigging last, and the reappearance of an approaching ship in reverse order.

Second. The curving shape of the earth’s shadow on the moon during an eclipse.

Third. The changing aspect of the heavens in different latitudes, some stars disappearing and others appearing, as the polar star in the northern hemisphere and the southern cross south of the equator.

“There is not a scintilla of truth in any of them,” Voliva retorts, “and yet you will find them in every geography, and every primary teacher repeats them like a parrot. I decline to be a parrot. A parrot is a man who never thinks for himself, but repeats what he hears without any questions as to why or wherefore.”

Zion maintains that the disappearance of a ship over a horizon hull first is an optical illusion of perspective, no different from the apparent merging of the railroad tracks in the distance. A man at the foot of a tree a couple of miles across a plain may be invisible, while the tree itself stands up against the sky and is visible for miles. Earth curvature of eight inches to the mile is not sufficient to explain the invisibility of the man.

As for Aristotle’s second point, Voliva and his followers maintain there is no proof that the curving shadow of an eclipse is the shadow of the earth, and maintain that there have been several eclipses within historical times in which both sun and moon were visible at the same time, so that the eclipse could not have, been due to the earth’s shadow.

As for the third proof, the Zionites and other believers in the Zetetic Astronomy of “Parallax” maintain that the stars are set in a hemispherical dome so low and close to the earth that not all stars can be visible from any one point. Dr. Samuel B. Rowbottom, of England, who, under the name of “Parallax” provided the explanations for all natural phenomena to fit the flat world theory, died in 1884, but his followers have kept his work alive.