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The Elizabethan Robert Burton (1577-1640), in his supreme 1621 effort The Anatomy of Melancholy¹ (“The best
book ever written. Period”)—ostensibly a quasi-medical book on depression/melancholy²  but
really about everything, not to mention the entirety of the sciences—called on
Galileo and Kepler in supporting his view that the “eighth sphere” (of Dante, containing
the starry realm and the abode of the Heavenly Father) was 170 million 800
miles away³ from the earth. 

Burton
thought that if you were to drop a stone from that distance and have it travel
100 mph it would take “65 years or more”, [page 152 or so]) to reach the ground
here on earth.  Heaven aside, something going
100mph for 65 years wouldn’t get but a third of the way to 170mil., though it
was interesting for

Burton to be thinking in terms of big distance like this at this time. There are by
the way other “eighth spheres” around in the history of science and literature,
from Sacrobosco to Copernicus, but Burton must absolutely be referring to Dante for this reference.

Well.  There is of
course much of great interest in this book that wound up being correct, and
then there was the other stuff, like this, that just didn’t work. Overall
though it may be a book to be buried with; it is beautiful, complex,
deliberate, fantastic, horribly erudite, compelling, and sometimes unreadable.  

Notes:

1.The full title of
the book, by the way, is: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all
the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Partitions with
their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically,
Historically, Opened and Cut up.  The book again was first published in 1621, and followed by revisions in  1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, and 1651; the 1651 edition was reprinted in 1660 and 1676, and then all was quiet until it was picked up again in 1800.

2.  Burton  identifies
Melancholia as follows: “Melancholy, the subject of our present
discourse, is either in disposition or in habit. In disposition, is that transitory Melancholy
which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness,
trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care,
discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation
of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing
frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call
him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any
way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions no man living
is free, no Stoick, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous,
so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well-composed, but more or
less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is
the character of Mortality. . . . This Melancholy of which we are to
treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour,
as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long
increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will
hardly be removed.”

3.  The quote for the 170 million mile high Heaven bit: “So that according to these men the number of ethereal spirits must needs be infinite: for if that be true that some of our mathematicians say: if a stone could fall from the starry heaven, or eighth sphere, and should pass every hour an hundred miles, it would be 65 years, or more, before it would come to ground, by reason of the great
distance of heaven from earth, which contains as some say 170 millions
800 miles, besides those other heavens, whether they be crystalline or
watery which Maginus adds,
which peradventure holds as much more, how many such spirits may it
contain? And yet for all this Thomas Albertus, and most hold that there
be far more angels than devils.”