"The world, marm," said I, anxious to display my acquired knowledge, "is not exactly round, but resembles in shape a flattened orange and it turns on its axis once in twenty-four hours." In the form of "rocks all the way down", the saying dates to at least 1838, when it was printed in an unsigned anecdote in the New-York Mirror about a schoolboy and an old woman living in the woods:
They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise." Modern form all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. The story is also referenced by Henry David Thoreau, who writes in his journal entry of : "Men are making speeches. Locke compares one who would say that properties inhere in "Substance" to the Indian who said the world was on an elephant which was on a tortoise, "But being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-back'd Tortoise, replied, something, he knew not what". Others dissented, and said, that the Earth was borne up by seven Elephants the Elephants' feet stood on Tortoises, and they were borne by they know not what." Purchas' account is again reflected by John Locke in his 1689 tract An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where Locke introduces the story as a trope referring to the problem of induction in philosophical debate. "that the Earth had nine corners, whereby it was borne up by the Heaven. Veiga's account seems to have been received by Samuel Purchas, who has a close paraphrase in his Purchas His Pilgrims (1613/1626),
When asked who would fix the body of the tortoise, so that it would not collapse, he said that he did not know. Another disagreeing from these would have the earth supported by seven elephants, and the elephants do not sink down because their feet are fixed on a tortoise. Others hold that the earth has nine corners by which the heavens are supported.
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