Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

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100 pages - You are on Page 55

Again, our theory is supported by the facts that the sun appears hazy and is darkened in the absence of clouds, and that there is sometimes calm and sharp frost before earthquakes at sunrise. The sun is necessarily obscured and darkened when the evaporation which dissolves and rarefies the air begins to withdraw into the earth. The calm, too, and the cold towards sunrise and dawn follow from the theory. The calm we have already explained. There must as a rule be calm because the wind flows back into the earth: again, it must be most marked before the more violent earthquakes, for when the wind is not part outside earth, part inside, but moves in a single body, its strength must be greater. The cold comes because the evaporation which is naturally and essentially hot enters the earth. (Wind is not recognized to be hot, because it sets the air in motion, and that is full of a quantity of cold vapour. It is the same with the breath we blow from our mouth: close by it is warm, as it is when we breathe out through the mouth, but there is so little of it that it is scarcely noticed, whereas at a distance it is cold for the same reason as wind.) Well, when this evaporation disappears into the earth the vaporous exhalation concentrates and causes cold in any place in which this disappearance occurs.

A sign which sometimes precedes earthquakes can be explained in the same way. Either by day or a little after sunset, in fine weather, a little, light, long-drawn cloud is seen, like a long very straight line. This is because the wind is leaving the air and dying down. Something analogous to this happens on the sea-shore. When the sea breaks in great waves the marks left on the sand are very thick and crooked, but when the sea is calm they are slight and straight (because the secretion is small). As the sea is to the shore so the wind is to the cloudy air; so, when the wind drops, this very straight and thin cloud is left, a sort of wave-mark in the air.

An earthquake sometimes coincides with an eclipse of the moon for the same reason. When the earth is on the point of being interposed, but the light and heat of the sun has not quite vanished from the air but is dying away, the wind which causes the earthquake before the eclipse, turns off into the earth, and calm ensues. For there often are winds before eclipses: at nightfall if the eclipse is at midnight, and at midnight if the eclipse is at dawn. They are caused by the lessening of the warmth from the moon when its sphere approaches the point at which the eclipse is going to take place. So the influence which restrained and quieted the air weakens and the air moves again and a wind rises, and does so later, the later the eclipse.

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