Atlantis Online
March 29, 2024, 02:28:47 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Underwater caves off Yucatan yield three old skeletons—remains date to 11,000 B.C.
http://www.edgarcayce.org/am/11,000b.c.yucata.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

Meteorology By Aristotle

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 [7] 8   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Meteorology By Aristotle  (Read 2812 times)
0 Members and 56 Guests are viewing this topic.
Bathos
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 141



« Reply #90 on: August 31, 2009, 12:10:46 am »

All this makes it clear that bodies are formed by heat and cold and
that these agents operate by thickening and solidifying. It is because
these qualities fashion bodies that we find heat in all of them, and
in some cold in so far as heat is absent. These qualities, then, are
present as active, and the moist and the dry as passive, and consequently
all four are found in mixed bodies. So water and earth are the constituents
of homogeneous bodies both in plants and in animals and of metals
such as gold, silver, and the rest-water and earth and their respective
exhalations shut up in the compound bodies, as we have explained elsewhere.

All these mixed bodies are distinguished from one another, firstly
by the qualities special to the various senses, that is, by their
capacities of action. (For a thing is white, fragrant, sonant, sweet,
hot, cold in virtue of a power of acting on sense). Secondly by other
more characteristic affections which express their aptitude to be
affected: I mean, for instance, the aptitude to melt or solidify or
bend and so forth, all these qualities, like moist and dry, being
passive. These are the qualities that differentiate bone, flesh, sinew,
wood, bark, stone and all other homogeneous natural bodies. Let us
begin by enumerating these qualities expressing the aptitude or inaptitude
of a thing to be affected in a certain way. They are as follows: to
be apt or inapt to solidify, melt, be softened by heat, be softened
by water, bend, break, be comminuted, impressed, moulded, squeezed;
to be tractile or non-tractile, malleable or non-malleable, to be
fissile or non-fissile, apt or inapt to be cut; to be viscous or friable,
compressible or incompressible, combustible or incombustible; to be
apt or inapt to give off fumes. These affections differentiate most
bodies from one another. Let us go on to explain the nature of each
of them. We have already given a general account of that which is
apt or inapt to solidify or to melt, but let us return to them again
now. Of all the bodies that admit of solidification and hardening,
some are brought into this state by heat, others by cold. Heat does
this by drying up their moisture, cold by driving out their heat.
Consequently some bodies are affected in this way by defect of moisture,
some by defect of heat: watery bodies by defect of heat, earthy bodies
of moisture. Now those bodies that are so affected by defect of moisture
are dissolved by water, unless like pottery they have so contracted
that their pores are too small for the particles of water to enter.
All those bodies in which this is not the case are dissolved by water,
e.g. natron, salt, dry mud. Those bodies that solidified through defect
of heat are melted by heat, e.g. ice, lead, copper. So much for the
bodies that admit of solidification and of melting, and those that
do not admit of melting.

The bodies which do not admit of solidification are those which contain
no aqueous moisture and are not watery, but in which heat and earth
preponderate, like honey and must (for these are in a sort of state
of effervescence), and those which do possess some water but have
a preponderance of air, like oil and quicksilver, and all viscous
substances such as pitch and birdlime.
Report Spam   Logged
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 [7] 8   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy