Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

100 pages - You are on Page 94

Those bodies give off fumes which contain moisture, but in such a form that it does not go off separately in vapour when they are exposed to fire. For vapour is a moist secretion tending to the nature of air produced from a liquid by the agency of burning heat. Bodies that give off fumes give off secretions of the nature of air by the lapse of time: as they perish away they dry up or become earth. But the kind of secretion we are concerned with now differs from others in that it is not moist nor does it become wind (which is a continuous flow of air in a given direction). Fumes are common secretion of dry and moist together caused by the agency of burning heat. Hence they do not moisten things but rather colour them.

The fumes of a woody body are called smoke. (I mean to include bones and hair and everything of this kind in the same class. For there is no name common to all the objects that I mean, but, for all that, these things are all in the same class by analogy. Compare what Empedocles says: They are one and the same, hair and leaves and the thick wings of birds and scales that grow on stout limbs.) The fumes of fat are a sooty smoke and those of oily substances a greasy steam. Oil does not boil away or thicken by evaporation because it does not give off vapour but fumes. Water on the other hand does not give off fumes, but vapour. Sweet wine does give off fumes, for it contains fat and behaves like oil. It does not solidify under the influence of cold and it is apt to burn. Really it is not wine at all in spite of its name: for it does not taste like wine and consequently does not inebriate as ordinary wine does. It contains but little fumigable stuff and consequently is inflammable.

All bodies are combustible that dissolve into ashes, and all bodies do this that solidify under the influence either of heat or of both heat and cold; for we find that all these bodies are mastered by fire. Of stones the precious stone called carbuncle is least amenable to fire.

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