These quotes from Pielou's Fresh Water and Melanchthon's Initia doctrinae physicae point to some of the major differences in the way the relationship between water, earth, and people as well as water and earth's place in the universe are conceptulized by sixteenth-century Europeans and their late twentieth-and twenty-first-century descendants. For Melanchthon as for many of his contemporaries as we have seen repeatedly throughout this book, water and earth were a part of God's created universe, their ontological and spatial relationships designed ultimately for human needs and human stewardship. For Melanchthon, his textbook, which drew on the accumulated wisdom of ancient scholars such as Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, could teach Europeans to study the physical world comprehensively, and in exploring this created universe through Melanchthon's explanation of these ancient texts, his readers could learn about their relationship to its creator. The quote from Pielou's Fresh Water suggests a radically different notion of the universe and its relationship to water among her late twentieth-century readers.