Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

100 pages - You are on Page 85

The subjects of drying are water and the various watery fluids and those bodies which contain water either foreign or connatural. By foreign I mean like the water in wool, by connatural, like that in milk. The watery fluids are wine, urine, whey, and in general those fluids which have no sediment or only a little, except where this absence of sediment is due to viscosity. For in some cases, in oil and pitch for instance, it is the viscosity which prevents any sediment from appearing.

It is always a process of heating or cooling that dries things, but the agent in both cases is heat, either internal or external. For even when things are dried by cooling, like a garment, where the moisture exists separately it is the internal heat that dries them. It carries off the moisture in the shape of vapour (if there is not too much of it), being itself driven out by the surrounding cold. So everything is dried, as we have said, by a process either of heating or cooling, but the agent is always heat, either internal or external, carrying off the moisture in vapour. By external heat I mean as where things are boiled: by internal where the heat breathes out and takes away and uses up its moisture. So much for drying.

Part 6

Liquefaction is, first, condensation into water; second, the melting of a solidified body. The first, condensation, is due to the cooling of vapour: what melting is will appear from the account of solidification.

Whatever solidifies is either water or a mixture of earth and water, and the agent is either dry heat or cold. Hence those of the bodies solidified by heat or cold which are soluble at all are dissolved by their opposites. Bodies solidified by the dry-hot are dissolved by water, which is the moist-cold, while bodies solidified by cold are dissolved by fire, which is hot. Some things seem to be solidified by water, e.g. boiled honey, but really it is not the water but the cold in the water which effects the solidification. Aqueous bodies are not solidified by fire: for it is fire that dissolves them, and the same cause in the same relation cannot have opposite effects upon the same thing. Again, water solidifies owing to the departure of heat; so it will clearly be dissolved by the entry into it of heat: cold, therefore, must be the agent in solidifying it.

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