Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

100 pages - You are on Page 56

A severe earthquake does not stop at once or after a single shock, but first the shocks go on, often for about forty days; after that, for one or even two years it gives premonitory indications in the same place. The severity of the earthquake is determined by the quantity of wind and the shape of the passages through which it flows. Where it is beaten back and cannot easily find its way out the shocks are most violent, and there it must remain in a cramped space like water that cannot escape. Any throbbing in the body does not cease suddenly or quickly, but by degrees according as the affection passes off. So here the agency which created the evaporation and gave it an impulse to motion clearly does not at once exhaust the whole of the material from which it forms the wind which we call an earthquake. So until the rest of this is exhausted the shocks must continue, though more gently, and they must go on until there is too little of the evaporation left to have any perceptible effect on the earth at all.

Subterranean noises, too, are due to the wind; sometimes they portend earthquakes but sometimes they have been heard without any earthquake following. Just as the air gives off various sounds when it is struck, so it does when it strikes other things; for striking involves being struck and so the two cases are the same. The sound precedes the shock because sound is thinner and passes through things more readily than wind. But when the wind is too weak by reason of thinness to cause an earthquake the absence of a shock is due to its filtering through readily, though by striking hard and hollow masses of different shapes it makes various noises, so that the earth sometimes seems to 'bellow' as the portentmongers say.

Water has been known to burst out during an earthquake. But that does not make water the cause of the earthquake. The wind is the efficient cause whether it drives the water along the surface or up from below: just as winds are the causes of waves and not waves of winds. Else we might as well say that earth was the cause; for it is upset in an earthquake, just like water (for effusion is a form of upsetting). No, earth and water are material causes (being patients, not agents): the true cause is the wind.

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