Meteorology By Aristotle

Things are tractile when their surface can be made to elongate, for
being drawn out is a movement of the surface, remaining unbroken,
in the direction of the mover. Some things are tractile, e.g. hair,
thongs, sinew, dough, birdlime, and some are not, e.g. water, stone.
Some things are both tractile and squeezable, e.g. wool; in other
cases the two qualities do not coincide; phlegm, for instance, is
tractile but not squeezable, and a sponge squeezable but not tractile.

Some things are malleable, like copper. Some are not, like stone and
wood. Things are malleable when their surface can be made to move
(but only in part) both downwards and sideways with one and the same
blow: when this is not possible a body is not malleable. All malleable
bodies are impressible, but not all impressible bodies are malleable,
e.g. wood, though on the whole the two go together. Of squeezable
things some are malleable and some not: wax and mud are malleable,
wool is not. Some things are fissile, e.g. wood, some are not, e.g.
potter's clay. A thing is fissile when it is apt to divide in advance
of the instrument dividing it, for a body is said to split when it
divides to a further point than that to which the dividing instrument
divides it and the act of division advances: which is not the case
with cutting. Those bodies which cannot behave like this are non-fissile.
Nothing soft is fissile (by soft I mean absolutely soft and not relatively:
for iron itself may be relatively soft); nor are all hard things fissile,
but only such as are neither liquid nor impressible nor comminuible.
Such are the bodies that have the pores along which they cohere lengthwise
and not crosswise.

Those hard or soft solids are apt to be cut which do not necessarily
either split in advance of the instrument or break into minute fragments
when they are being divided. Those that necessarily do so and liquids
cannot be cut. Some things can be both split and cut, like wood, though
generally it is lengthwise that a thing can be split and crosswise
that it can be cut. For, a body being divided into many parts fin
so far as its unity is made up of many lengths it is apt to be split,
in so far as it is made up of many breadths it is apt to be cut.