Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

100 pages - You are on Page 89

All these mixed bodies are distinguished from one another, firstly by the qualities special to the various senses, that is, by their capacities of action. (For a thing is white, fragrant, sonant, sweet, hot, cold in virtue of a power of acting on sense). Secondly by other more characteristic affections which express their aptitude to be affected: I mean, for instance, the aptitude to melt or solidify or bend and so forth, all these qualities, like moist and dry, being passive. These are the qualities that differentiate bone, flesh, sinew, wood, bark, stone and all other homogeneous natural bodies. Let us begin by enumerating these qualities expressing the aptitude or inaptitude of a thing to be affected in a certain way. They are as follows: to be apt or inapt to solidify, melt, be softened by heat, be softened by water, bend, break, be comminuted, impressed, moulded, squeezed; to be tractile or non-tractile, malleable or non-malleable, to be fissile or non-fissile, apt or inapt to be cut; to be viscous or friable, compressible or incompressible, combustible or incombustible; to be apt or inapt to give off fumes. These affections differentiate most bodies from one another. Let us go on to explain the nature of each of them. We have already given a general account of that which is apt or inapt to solidify or to melt, but let us return to them again now. Of all the bodies that admit of solidification and hardening, some are brought into this state by heat, others by cold. Heat does this by drying up their moisture, cold by driving out their heat. Consequently some bodies are affected in this way by defect of moisture, some by defect of heat: watery bodies by defect of heat, earthy bodies of moisture. Now those bodies that are so affected by defect of moisture are dissolved by water, unless like pottery they have so contracted that their pores are too small for the particles of water to enter. All those bodies in which this is not the case are dissolved by water, e.g. natron, salt, dry mud. Those bodies that solidified through defect of heat are melted by heat, e.g. ice, lead, copper. So much for the bodies that admit of solidification and of melting, and those that do not admit of melting.

The bodies which do not admit of solidification are those which contain no aqueous moisture and are not watery, but in which heat and earth preponderate, like honey and must (for these are in a sort of state of effervescence), and those which do possess some water but have a preponderance of air, like oil and quicksilver, and all viscous substances such as pitch and birdlime.

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