Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

100 pages - You are on Page 98

Gold, then, and silver and copper and tin and lead and glass and many nameless stone are of water: for they are all melted by heat. Of water, too, are some wines and urine and vinegar and lye and whey and serum: for they are all congealed by cold. In iron, horn, nails, bones, sinews, wood, hair, leaves, bark, earth preponderates. So, too, in amber, myrrh, frankincense, and all the substances called 'tears', and stalactites, and fruits, such as leguminous plants and corn. For things of this kind are, to a greater or less degree, of earth. For of all these bodies some admit of softening by heat, the rest give off fumes and are formed by refrigeration. So again in natron, salt, and those kinds of stones that are not formed by refrigeration and cannot be melted. Blood, on the other hand, and semen, are made up of earth and water and air. If the blood contains fibres, earth preponderates in it: consequently its solidifies by refrigeration and is melted by liquids; if not, it is of water and therefore does not solidify. Semen solidifies by refrigeration, its moisture leaving it together with its heat.

Part 11

We must investigate in the light of the results we have arrived at what solid or liquid bodies are hot and what cold.

Bodies consisting of water are commonly cold, unless (like lye, urine, wine) they contain foreign heat. Bodies consisting of earth, on the other hand, are commonly hot because heat was active in forming them: for instance lime and ashes.

We must recognize that cold is in a sense the matter of bodies. For the dry and the moist are matter (being passive) and earth and water are the elements that primarily embody them, and they are characterized by cold. Consequently cold must predominate in every body that consists of one or other of the elements simply, unless such a body contains foreign heat as water does when it boils or when it has been strained through ashes. This latter, too, has acquired heat from the ashes, for everything that has been burnt contains more or less heat. This explains the generation of animals in putrefying bodies: the putrefying body contains the heat which destroyed its proper heat.

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