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Meteorology By Aristotle

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Bathos
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« Reply #60 on: August 30, 2009, 11:53:30 pm »

Subterranean noises, too, are due to the wind; sometimes they portend
earthquakes but sometimes they have been heard without any earthquake
following. Just as the air gives off various sounds when it is struck,
so it does when it strikes other things; for striking involves being
struck and so the two cases are the same. The sound precedes the shock
because sound is thinner and passes through things more readily than
wind. But when the wind is too weak by reason of thinness to cause
an earthquake the absence of a shock is due to its filtering through
readily, though by striking hard and hollow masses of different shapes
it makes various noises, so that the earth sometimes seems to 'bellow'
as the portentmongers say.

Water has been known to burst out during an earthquake. But that does
not make water the cause of the earthquake. The wind is the efficient
cause whether it drives the water along the surface or up from below:
just as winds are the causes of waves and not waves of winds. Else
we might as well say that earth was the cause; for it is upset in
an earthquake, just like water (for effusion is a form of upsetting).
No, earth and water are material causes (being patients, not agents):
the true cause is the wind.

The combination of a tidal wave with an earthquake is due to the presence
of contrary winds. It occurs when the wind which is shaking the earth
does not entirely succeed in driving off the sea which another wind
is bringing on, but pushes it back and heaps it up in a great mass
in one place. Given this situation it follows that when this wind
gives way the whole body of the sea, driven on by the other wind,
will burst out and overwhelm the land. This is what happened in Achaea.
There a south wind was blowing, but outside a north wind; then there
was a calm and the wind entered the earth, and then the tidal wave
came on and simultaneously there was an earthquake. This was the more
violent as the sea allowed no exit to the wind that had entered the
earth, but shut it in. So in their struggle with one another the wind
caused the earthquake, and the wave by its settling down the inundation.
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