Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

100 pages - You are on Page 88

Some of these bodies are soluble, e.g. natron, some insoluble, e.g. pottery: of the latter, some, like horn, can be softened by heat, others, like pottery and stone, cannot. The reason is that opposite causes have opposite effects: consequently, if solidification is due to two causes, the cold and the dry, solution must be due to the hot and the moist, that is, to fire and to water (these being opposites): water dissolving what was solidified by fire alone, fire what was solidified by cold alone. Consequently, if any things happen to be solidified by the action of both, these are least apt to be soluble. Such a case we find where things have been heated and are then solidified by cold. When the heat in leaving them has caused most of the moisture to evaporate, the cold so compacts these bodies together again as to leave no entrance even for moisture. Therefore heat does not dissolve them (for it only dissolves those bodies that are solidified by cold alone), nor does water (for it does not dissolve what cold solidifies, but only what is solidified by dry heat). But iron is melted by heat and solidified by cold. Wood consists of earth and air and is therefore combustible but cannot be melted or softened by heat. (For the same reason it floats in water-all except ebony. This does not, for other kinds of wood contain a preponderance of air, but in black ebony the air has escaped and so earth preponderates in it.) Pottery consists of earth alone because it solidified gradually in the process of drying. Water cannot get into it, for the pores were only large enough to admit of vapour escaping: and seeing that fire solidified it, that cannot dissolve it either.

So solidification and melting, their causes, and the kinds of subjects in which they occur have been described.

Part 8

All this makes it clear that bodies are formed by heat and cold and that these agents operate by thickening and solidifying. It is because these qualities fashion bodies that we find heat in all of them, and in some cold in so far as heat is absent. These qualities, then, are present as active, and the moist and the dry as passive, and consequently all four are found in mixed bodies. So water and earth are the constituents of homogeneous bodies both in plants and in animals and of metals such as gold, silver, and the rest-water and earth and their respective exhalations shut up in the compound bodies, as we have explained elsewhere.

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