The Summary of Physics Restored

68Coldness loves dryness and assumes it wherever it rules vigorously, by constricting and drying moist things, as snow, ice and hail teach us. For it is nature's work to constrict and dry water, than which nothing is moister, using cold as its own instrument. Indeed, moisture is the chief subject common to heat and cold, vigorously assaulted by both until it is conquered. Hence so many leaves fall dry at autumn's first cold, and, as winter presses on, the stems of weak plants are deprived of moisture and wither into utter dryness. Thus penetrating cold burns and invades things' vital moistures like an enemy. Hence comes slack and withering old age, and finally death, which with its sharpest cold, like a steel scythe, reaps all dried things and gathers them into its granaries. How, then, can anyone declare that cold favours the moist element and inheres in it as its most proper quality? Nature does not allow elements to act against themselves, lest they destroy or suppress their own powers. Yet intense coldness would undoubtedly conquer weak, defenceless moistness at once and, drying it forcefully through constriction, would exhaust it entirely or lay it low in its weakness. Thus, with one element brought to ruin and the work of the others left unfinished, the complete failure of the generation of things would necessarily follow. To attribute the greatest coldness to water therefore contradicts nature's law.