Page - 758 - in The Complete Aristotle

wind, and thunderbolts: for the cause of them all is the same. As we have said, there are two kinds of exhalation, moist and dry, and the atmosphere contains them both potentially. It, as we have said before, condenses into cloud, and the density of the clouds is highest at their upper limit. (For they must be denser and colder on the side where the heat escapes to the upper region and leaves them. This explains why hurricanes and thunderbolts and all analogous phenomena move downwards in spite of the fact that everything hot has a natural tendency upwards. Just as the pips that we squeeze between our fingers are heavy but often jump upwards: so these things are necessarily squeezed out away from the densest part of the cloud.) Now the heat that escapes disperses to the up region. But if any of the dry exhalation is caught in the process as the air cools, it is squeezed out as the clouds contract, and collides in its rapid course with the neighbouring clouds, and the sound of this collision is what we call thunder. This collision is analogous, to compare small with great, to the sound we hear in a flame which men call the laughter or the threat of Hephaestus or of Hestia. This occurs when the wood dries and cracks and the exhalation rushes on the flame in a body. So in the clouds, the exhalation is projected and its impact on dense clouds causes thunder: the variety of the sound is due to the irregularity of the clouds and the hollows that intervene where their density is interrupted. This then, is thunder, and this its cause. It usually happens that the exhalation that is ejected is inflamed and burns with a thin and faint fire: this is what we call lightning, where we see as it were the exhalation coloured in the act of its ejection. It comes into existence after the collision and the thunder, though we see it earlier because sight is quicker than hearing. The rowing of triremes illustrates this: the oars are going back again before the sound of their striking the water reaches us. However, there are some who maintain that there is actually fire in the clouds. Empedocles says that it consists of some of the sun’s rays which are intercepted: Anaxagoras that it is part of the upper ether (which he calls fire) which has descended from above. Lightning, then, is the gleam of this fire, and thunder the hissing noise of its extinction in the cloud. But this involves the view that lightning actually is prior to thunder and does not merely appear to be so. Again, this intercepting of the fire is impossible on either theory, but especially it is said to be drawn down from the upper ether. Some reason ought to be given why that which naturally ascends should descend, and why it should not always do so, but only when it is cloudy. When the sky is clear there is no lightning: to say that there is, is altogether wanton. The view that the heat of the sun’s rays intercepted in the clouds is the 758