Meteorology By Aristotle

Now we see that warm and cold react upon one another by recoil. Hence
in warm weather the lower parts of the earth are cold and in a frost
they are warm. The same thing, we must suppose, happens in the air,
so that in the warmer seasons the cold is concentrated by the surrounding
heat and causes the cloud to go over into water suddenly. (For this
reason rain-drops are much larger on warm days than in winter, and
showers more violent. A shower is said to be more violent in proportion
as the water comes down in a body, and this happens when the condensation
takes place quickly,-though this is just the opposite of what Anaxagoras
says. He says that this happens when the cloud has risen into the
cold air; whereas we say that it happens when the cloud has descended
into the warm air, and that the more the further the cloud has descended).
But when the cold has been concentrated within still more by the outer
heat, it freezes the water it has formed and there is hail. We get
hail when the process of freezing is quicker than the descent of the
water. For if the water falls in a certain time and the cold is sufficient
to freeze it in less, there is no difficulty about its having frozen
in the air, provided that the freezing takes place in a shorter time
than its fall. The nearer to the earth, and the more suddenly, this
process takes place, the more violent is the rain that results and
the larger the raindrops and the hailstones because of the shortness
of their fall. For the same reason large raindrops do not fall thickly.
Hail is rarer in summer than in spring and autumn, though commoner
than in winter, because the air is drier in summer, whereas in spring
it is still moist, and in autumn it is beginning to grow moist. It
is for the same reason that hailstorms sometimes occur in the late
summer as we have said.

The fact that the water has previously been warmed contributes to
its freezing quickly: for so it cools sooner. Hence many people, when
they want to cool hot water quickly, begin by putting it in the sun.
So the inhabitants of Pontus when they encamp on the ice to fish (they
cut a hole in the ice and then fish) pour warm water round their reeds
that it may freeze the quicker, for they use the ice like lead to
fix the reeds. Now it is in hot countries and seasons that the water
which forms soon grows warm.