Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

100 pages - You are on Page 91

Some bodies can be bent or straightened, like the reed or the withy, some cannot, like pottery and stone. Those bodies are apt to be bent and straightened which can change from being curved to being straight and from being straight to being curved, and bending and straightening consist in the change or motion to the straight or to a curve, for a thing is said to be in process of being bent whether it is being made to assume a convex or a concave shape. So bending is defined as motion to the convex or the concave without a change of length. For if we added 'or to the straight', we should have a thing bent and straight at once, and it is impossible for that which is straight to be bent. And if all bending is a bending back or a bending down, the former being a change to the convex, the latter to the concave, a motion that leads to the straight cannot be called bending, but bending and straightening are two different things. These, then, are the things that can, and those that cannot be bent, and be straightened.

Some things can be both broken and comminuted, others admit only one or the other. Wood, for instance, can be broken but not comminuted, ice and stone can be comminuted but not broken, while pottery may either be comminuted or broken. The distinction is this: breaking is a division and separation into large parts, comminution into parts of any size, but there must be more of them than two. Now those solids that have many pores not communicating with one another are comminuible (for the limit to their subdivision is set by the pores), but those whose pores stretch continuously for a long way are breakable, while those which have pores of both kinds are both comminuible and breakable.

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