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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

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Book I Chapter 32

Chapter 32: On winds

On winds.

⟨Aëtius and Didymus.⟩⁹³⁶

Aristotle: The origin of wind

Aristotle identifies wind with the first rising of dry exhalation.⁹³⁷ At times, however, the dry exhalation mixes with the moist. A current of wind comes from many exhalations gathering together.⁹³⁸ -

Wind and squalls

For wind is a mass of dry exhalation moving around the earth.⁹³⁹ Squalls arise when this material moves as a dense mass and, through the violence of its rush, dissolves the greater part of the cloud into itself. For the speed of its discharge produces the wind’s strength.⁹⁴⁰

936.Wachsmuth’s bracketed Latin source-heading, translated here, identifies Aëtius (III.7.4) and Didymus. His apparatus credits Diels with recognizing that excerpts from the two sources have been joined. The printed division is retained between the two passages below.

937.The opening is abbreviated: the English supplies “identifies wind with” from the subject of the chapter. Aristotle’s name is printed without brackets; the apparatus records it as a marginal addition in manuscript P. Anaphora means a rising or carrying upward.

938.The dry and moist exhalations are the two kinds distinguished in the preceding chapter. Compare Aristotle, Meteorology II.4, on their coexistence and the formation of wind from many exhalations. The translation preserves “at times” as this abridgment states it.

939.Compare Meteorology II.4, 361a31 and following. The printed peri gēn is “around the earth,” rather than the variant epi gēn, “over the earth.” Anadōsis, literally a giving or rising up, here denotes the exhaled material in motion.

940.Eknephiai are winds bursting from cloud, rendered “squalls.” The compressed clause is taken to describe the moving material absorbing the cloud as it dissolves; “into itself” preserves eis heauto. Compare Meteorology III.1 on a dense discharge and its speed. Obscured letters in the supplied image were checked in the Toronto scan of the same 1884 edition.