The Summary of Physics Restored

105Whoever calls hot and cold, wet and dry, simply contraries is therefore mistaken. For Earth, which Aristotle establishes as supremely dry, would oppose Air, which he regards as supremely moist. Water, likewise intensely cold, would oppose intensely hot Fire in his account. This opposition would confine each of the common Elements, or each region of the World, within the boundaries of its own sphere and exclude it from the dwelling and dominion of its contrary through antipathy. Reason and experience, however, teach us that things are otherwise. Pits and underground hollows, indeed the Earth’s very entrails and pores, are filled with air. The Earth’s inward moisture, by which all plants are nourished as by their mother’s own milk, is nothing other than warm and moist air clinging most closely to the Earth and imparting a fostering and nourishing power to her. The earth’s pores are her breasts and the airy moisture their milk, with which she, the parent and nurse of things, feeds her offspring and gives them growth.