Page - 790 - in The Complete Aristotle

Homogeneous bodies differ to touch-by these affections and differences, as we have said. They also differ in respect of their smell, taste, and colour. By homogeneous bodies I mean, for instance, ‘metals’, gold, copper, silver, tin, iron, stone, and everything else of this kind and the bodies that are extracted from them; also the substances found in animals and plants, for instance, flesh, bones, sinew, skin, viscera, hair, fibres, veins (these are the elements of which the non-homogeneous bodies like the face, a hand, a foot, and everything of that kind are made up), and in plants, wood, bark, leaves, roots, and the rest like them. The homogeneous bodies, it is true, are constituted by a different cause, but the matter of which they are composed is the dry and the moist, that is, water and earth (for these bodies exhibit those qualities most clearly). The agents are the hot and the cold, for they constitute and make concrete the homogeneous bodies out of earth and water as matter. Let us consider, then, which of the homogeneous bodies are made of earth and which of water, and which of both. Of organized bodies some are liquid, some soft, some hard. The soft and the hard are constituted by a process of solidification, as we have already explained. Those liquids that go off in vapour are made of water, those that do not are either of the nature of earth, or a mixture either of earth and water, like milk, or of earth and air, like wood, or of water and air, like oil. Those liquids which are thickened by heat are a mixture. (Wine is a liquid which raises a difficulty: for it is both liable to evaporation and it also thickens; for instance new wine does. The reason is that the word ‘wine’ is ambiguous and different ‘wines’ behave in different ways. New wine is more earthy than old, and for this reason it is more apt to be thickened by heat and less apt to be congealed by cold. For it contains much heat and a great proportion of earth, as in Arcadia, where it is so dried up in its skins by the smoke that you scrape it to drink. If all wine has some sediment in it then it will belong to earth or to water according to the quantity of the sediment it possesses.) The liquids that are thickened by cold are of the nature of earth; those that are thickened either by heat or by cold consist of more than one element, like oil and honey, and ‘sweet wine’. Of solid bodies those that have been solidified by cold are of water, e.g. ice, snow, hail, hoar-frost. Those solidified by heat are of earth, e.g. pottery, cheese, natron, salt. Some bodies are solidified by both heat and cold. Of this kind are those solidified by refrigeration, that is by the privation both of heat and of the moisture which departs with the heat. For salt and the bodies that are purely of earth solidify by the privation of moisture only, ice by that of 790