Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

100 pages - You are on Page 82

Broiling is concoction by dry foreign heat. Hence if a man were to boil a thing but the change and concoction in it were due, not to the heat of the liquid but to that of the fire, the thing will have been broiled and not boiled when the process has been carried to completion: if the process has gone too far we use the word 'scorched' to describe it. If the process leaves the thing drier at the end the agent has been dry heat. Hence the outside is drier than the inside, the opposite being true of things boiled. Where the process is artificial, broiling is more difficult than boiling, for it is difficult to heat the inside and the outside uniformly, since the parts nearer to the fire are the first to get dry and consequently get more intensely dry. In this way the outer pores contract and the moisture in the thing cannot be secreted but is shut in by the closing of the pores. Now broiling and boiling are artificial processes, but the same general kind of thing, as we said, is found in nature too. The affections produced are similar though they lack a name; for art imitates nature. For instance, the concoction of food in the body is like boiling, for it takes place in a hot and moist medium and the agent is the heat of the body. So, too, certain forms of indigestion are like imperfect boiling. And it is not true that animals are generated in the concoction of food, as some say. Really they are generated in the excretion which putrefies in the lower belly, and they ascend afterwards. For concoction goes on in the upper belly but the excretion putrefies in the lower: the reason for this has been explained elsewhere.

We have seen that the opposite of boiling is imperfect boiling: now there is something correspondingly opposed to the species of concoction called broiling, but it is more difficult to find a name for it. It would be the kind of thing that would happen if there were imperfect broiling instead of broiling proper through lack of heat due to deficiency in the external fire or to the quantity of water in the thing undergoing the process. For then we should get too much heat for no effect to be produced, but too little for concoction to take place.

We have now explained concoction and inconcoction, ripening and rawness, boiling and broiling, and their opposites.

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