Evaporation and vapor

From the book

Stobaeus, Volume I

John Stobaeus · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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ἀτμός; ἀτμίς

atmos; atmis

Atmos and atmis name vapor.

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordAtmos and atmis name vapor.
In StobaeusThe meteorological account likens heat lifting vapor to a bearer carrying a burden.
In this edition“Vapor” is appropriate for the noun; “evaporation” names the process only when the construction supports it.
A place to beginVapor is the burden carried upward by heat.

English renderings: vapor; evaporation

Meaning

Atmos and atmis name vapor. Related verbal forms describe its rising or formation, while the nouns primarily identify what is raised.

Use in the book

The meteorological account likens heat lifting vapor to a bearer carrying a burden. Vapor from low, moist places is said to remain near earth when the heat cannot raise it farther. The analogy explains limits of ascent within this ancient physical account.

Places to read

I.31.6.6Vapor is the burden carried upward by heat.

Translation in this edition

“Vapor” is appropriate for the noun; “evaporation” names the process only when the construction supports it.

Source note

Wachsmuth, volume I, printed pp. 244–245. The abridgment extends its claim more broadly than Aristotle’s immediate discussion of frost; the transmitted scope is retained.

From the book

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Robert Burton · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Vapours

Vapour; vapours; vapors

Vapour, with the plural spellings vapours and vapors, names a fine emanation or exhaled substance.

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordVapour, with the plural spellings vapours and vapors, names a fine emanation or exhaled substance.
In the Anatomy of MelancholyThe anatomical definition of spirit makes it an extremely fine vapour extracted from blood, an instrument enabling the soul's actions.
In this edition“For want of vapours he could not sleep” becomes “For lack of vapours he could not sleep.”
A place to readblack fumes and fogs in the praise of borage and hellebore

Meaning

Vapour, with the plural spellings vapours and vapors, names a fine emanation or exhaled substance. In Burton it can be a bodily agent, atmospheric moisture, steam, or heat in a poetic fire-image. Latin vapor likewise means steam or heat in the verse passages considered here. Fume and fumes often describe the same smoke-like bodily emanations, while Latin fumus means smoke or a smoke-like exhalation. Exhalation can mean the process of escape as well as the escaping material. The related verb appears when vapours fume up into the head. Exhale means breathe out or discharge; evaporate means pass into vapour. Both verbs also acquire figurative uses for departing life, lost wits, or a person opening out under wine’s influence. These words acquire their precise role from a passage: a vapour is not necessarily diseased, and a poetic vapour is not necessarily a physiological substance.

Use in the book

The anatomical definition of spirit makes it an extremely fine vapour extracted from blood, an instrument enabling the soul's actions. This account gives vapour a necessary, mediating function. The lungs also breathe out the heart's fumes in Burton's cooling physiology. In the account of smell, by contrast, he refuses to decide whether its object is a quality, fume, vapour or exhalation. The list marks an unresolved classification, not four confidently interchangeable substances.

Vapours are central to sleep. Vapours rising from the stomach supposedly fill the nerves and block the passage of spirits, suspending the senses; when they disperse, the passages reopen and waking activity returns. Other passages explain troubled dreams or the feeling of being ridden by a witch through humours and vapours disturbing imagination. The sleepwalking sequence preserves each agent: vapours move imagination, imagination moves appetite, and appetite moves animal spirits, which bring about bodily motion. The vapours initiate the chain rather than directly exercising every faculty. In a separate, gendered account of uterine illness, vapours and a “fuliginous exhalation” are alleged to arise from menstrual blood and corrupted reproductive seed, affecting the brain through sympathy with another bodily part. Here the duration matters: distress lasts while the vapour lasts, then cheerful conversation and laughter may return. Burton allows an exception for a long-established disorder, which is more frequent, violent and continuous.

This model makes both accumulation and deficiency significant. Cabbage is said to send black vapours to the brain, while certain cooked fruits are recommended for holding rising vapours down. Retained generative fluid is alleged to send poisonous vapours towards heart and brain in some people. Excessive study weakens digestion, and bodily inactivity prevents surplus vapours escaping; properly timed exercise is praised for expelling waste through sweat and imperceptible vapours. Excessive exercise, however, is said to disturb humours that nature could otherwise process, producing foul vapour. The qualification about amount and occasion prevents these claims becoming a simple command to increase evacuation or activity without limit.

In the analysis of melancholy, vapours explain how one bodily region affects another. The brain may be disordered in itself or through vapours rising from elsewhere, altering its animal faculties. The hypochondriacal explanation sends vapours from undigested matter up to the brain: chimney smoke and a cloud across the sun make their supposed movement and darkening effect visible. The subsequent debate about fear and sorrow records objections to the explanation through inward darkness. Burton rejects Fracastorius's alternative when it cannot explain fear in hot, scorched-choler cases. He then reports competing accounts of the organ from which the black vapours originate, treating that dispute as less important to his present point than their continuing effect.

The moral consequence is explicit. Suffering said to occur without an apparent cause still has an internal cause in this model. Telling someone not to fear or grieve cannot simply remove the bodily impediment, any more than telling a wounded person not to hurt. A later comfort to the religiously distressed invokes disturbed humours and black fumes while placing responsibility for unwanted blasphemous thoughts outside the sufferer's unwilling consent; its continuation extends the comfort to partial assent afterwards rejected, distinguishing it from a settled will. Conversely, the definition of despair has fumes arising from prolonged terrors: the relationship between bodily disturbance and passion is not presented only in one direction.

Other symptoms receive more particular explanations: vapours allegedly produce palpitation, aching and cold sweat; pleasant vapours from the heart tickle the diaphragm in sanguine laughter; corrupt vapours cloud or colour visual perception; and vapours make the ears ring in a report of imagined music. Variations in fumes are also said to produce changing likes and dislikes in restlessness. The pleasant kind and the normal sleep mechanism show why the word cannot be glossed simply as a harmful emission. Treatment may aim to disperse, suppress, draw away or release vapours. Balm is praised for clearing melancholic vapours from the spirits, distinguishing the unwanted emanations from those bodily agents. The cupping margin says vapours must be drawn away from the brain; the later wine passage credits moderate, properly timed use with dispersing thick vapours. These are attributed historical remedies. The disturbing discussion of skull-boring belongs to this historical rationale, and includes Gordonius's stipulation that cauteries be tried last. Its narrated cures are attributed testimony; they are not a recommendation or verification of these procedures. Body and margin also differ over boring and cautery and over the designated site. Immediately afterwards Messaria rejects cauteries altogether: he holds the humour too resistant and too thick to be “so evaporated.” This is an objection to the proposed escape mechanism from within the humoral framework, and prevents the sequence being read as unanimous approval.

The fasting passage is one important application of the sleep model. Burton links Hilarion's extreme emaciation with a lack of vapours, inability to sleep and subsequently disordered thought and frightening noises. He draws on Jerome and invokes Athanasius's Antony, but the edition warns that these details must not all be transferred wholesale to Antony. Burton recasts devotional narrative physiologically. Both before and after it he commends moderate, appropriate fasting and contemplation; the criticism concerns excess and abuse.

The family extends beyond inward disease. Lakes may lose water by exhalation, meaning evaporation. The wine-to-vinegar analogy likewise describes “exhalation of purer spirits,” the escape of finer volatile components, as an alternative to decay. A vessel of warm water can “evaporate” in a room, with aromatics added to perfume the air. Vapours are atmospheric phenomena in disputes over how high clouds can rise. A hot, dry exhalation belongs to the Aristotelian account of comets that the passage's celestial-matter argument opposes. In erotic verse, steam supposedly rises when a beautiful woman heats a bath; Burton soon labels such tales matters of poetic faith. Latin vapor elsewhere means the heat of love compared with Etna or a house fire; Burton's own “fiery vapour” has the same force. The eye-beam discussion, however, proposes a physiological explanation: vapours of spirits and corrupt blood pass between gazers. Burton acknowledges the objection from the theory that vision receives something into the eye, while reporting Ficino's contrary illustration. The distinction between that alleged mechanism and poetic heat is worth preserving.

Smoke and exhalation also supply ordinary and figurative images. The Latin fumus is actual escaping fire-smoke in Euclio’s absurd complaint that his property is being lost; Fumis names the smoke that begrimes nocturnal scholars, and Fumo sacrificial smoke in Burton’s hostile account of pagan worship. In the beauty poem fumus becomes an image of something fleeting and insubstantial.

The verbs can describe either loss or enlivening. Burton’s satirical lost wits are “evaporated,” imagined through Ariosto as stored in jars above the moon. Grief for Prince Henry feels as though all one’s dearest friends’ lives had “exhaled” with his: the comparison does not say they really died. Conversely, moderate wine makes otherwise dull people “exhale & evaporate like frankincense,” opening out and giving off their spirit in the edition’s rendering. That is a favourable release image, conditioned by moderation, rather than the earlier loss of intelligence.

Fume also supplies non-physiological images. A rich fool is smothered in fumes and eulogies, clouds of flattery. A hot-tempered suitor's fuming means blustering. In a reported doctrine about the soul, vanishing into smoke represents eventual extinction after the body's decay, not Burton's established conclusion about immortality. Related smoke words also reach beyond inward emanations. Suffumigations are smoke or fumigations: Burton includes them among natural means of producing deceptive appearances, alongside candles and optical devices, and later among alleged measures against haunting spirits. The lists belong to different arguments; a deceptive appearance is not an actual bodily transformation, and the later catalogue does not establish a cure. The love-dissection margin calls a liver suffumigatum, smoke-blackened, within the unverified story transmitted through Hoffmann. The night-time vapours in a Horatian quotation concern the feared effects of drinking, not outdoor night air. Near the book's close, the Latin phrase venenatis fumis means poisonous fumes, but its grammatical attachment is uncertain; the edition takes them as an affliction from which minds are relieved, not as a separate agent recommended for expelling demons.

Related entries

Spirits; Phlegm; Hypochondria; Obnubilate; Concoction; Excrements; Imagination; Animal faculties; Consent and essence; Blood and sanguine; Religious melancholy; Despair

Places to read

Explanation of the frontispiece, unnumbered preliminary matterblack fumes and fogs in the praise of borage and hellebore
Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 14fumes and eulogies as flattering praise
Democritus Junior to the Readerwits evaporated in the Ariostan fiction of their storage above the moon
First Partition, anatomyspirit as fine vapour and respiration as discharge of the heart's fumes
First Partition, outward and inward sensesunresolved account of smell; stomach vapours blocking spirits in sleep
First Partition, rational soula reported Stoic soul vanishing into smoke
First Partition, humoral transformationwine’s purer spirits escaping by exhalation, compared with changes in humours
First Partition, bodily causesdiet, retained seed and excessive exercise as alleged sources of harmful vapours
First Partition, imaginationdreams, oppressive nightmare and the staged causation of sleepwalking
First Partition, avaricefumus as ordinary fire-smoke in Euclio’s complaint of waste
First Partition, studyimpaired digestion and surplus vapours unable to escape
First Partition, learned rulersFumis, the smoke of nocturnal study
First Partition, grieflives exhaled as a counterfactual image of shared bereavement
First Partition, inward causesvapour generated locally or carried from other parts, and disorder through bodily sympathy
First Partition, hypochondriacal symptomsthe chimney and cloud analogies
First Partition, melancholy in womenreproductive exhalations, sympathetic effects, and distress lasting as long as the vapour, with the chronic exception
First Partition, causes of fear and sorrowthe darkness debate, disputed bodily origins and the argument that an inward cause cannot be removed by a bare command
First Partition, restlessnessvarying fumes as the supposed cause of changing preferences
First Partition, particular mechanismspalpitation and sweat, pleasant vapours and laughter, and visual disturbance
First Partition, deceptive appearancessuffumigations as externally produced smoke, listed with optical devices and other natural causes
First Partition, hearingbodily vapours as the alleged cause of ringing mistaken for music
Second Partition, dietcooked fruits and the alleged suppression of rising vapours
Second Partition, digression on airevaporation, atmospheric vapours and competing accounts of comets
Second Partition, room airwarm water evaporating with added aromatics
Second Partition, exercisewaste escaping by sweat and imperceptible vapours
Second Partition, company and mirthnight-time fumes of drinking in the warning about bad company
Second Partition, balmclearing melancholic vapours from bodily spirits in the reported remedial claims
Second Partition, avertersdrawing vapours away by rubbing and dry cupping; releasing sooty vapours by cautery or boring; discrepant body and margins; Gordonius’s last-resort condition and Messaria’s subsequent rejection of all cauteries
Second Partition, winemoderate use makes dull people exhale like frankincense and supposedly disperses thick vapours
Third Partition, praise of beautyvapor as bath steam in a tale granted only poetic belief
Third Partition, eyes as an attractionalleged vapours of spirits and blood passing through eye-beams, with the acknowledged optical objection
Third Partition, enticementsa suitor's fuming as blustering
Third Partition, symptoms of lovevapor and fiery vapour as the consuming heat of passion; suffumigatum, smoke-blackened, in the alleged dissection
Third Partition, fading beautyfumus and smoke among the images of transience
Third Partition, religious melancholyfasting, lack of vapours, sleeplessness and frightening perceptions, bounded by praise of moderation
Third Partition, pagan worshipsacrificial smoke in an attributed polemical caricature
Third Partition, despairterrors producing fumes and bodily explanations of unwanted thoughts
Third Partition, cure of despairfumigation and the uncertain attachment of poisonous fumes; later suffumigations and the reported rationale for scents and lights

In this edition

“For want of vapours he could not sleep” becomes “For lack of vapours he could not sleep.” Vapours remains because the causal account is Burton's historical one. “Insensible vapours” becomes “imperceptible vapours,” identifying emissions not noticed by the senses, rather than unconscious agents. “Fume up” becomes “steaming up,” and “fuliginous vapours” becomes “sooty vapours.”

The modern phrase “clouds of praise” renders the whole “fumes and eulogies,” not fumes alone. “Fuming” becomes “blustering” for Lucretia's suitor. “Nocturnos … vapores” is rendered as “night-time fumes of wine”: wine is supplied from the drinking context. The edition retains Burton's vapores although its Horatian comparison text has a different word. In the love passages Latin vapor is rendered heat or steam according to the local image; the single English equivalent vapour would blur that distinction. The original “spiritual vapours” becomes “vapours of the spirits,” keeping these bodily spirits distinct from a purely immaterial use of spiritual. The closing venenatis fumis is preserved with the edition's disclosed uncertainty rather than converted into confident therapeutic agency.

“Exhalation of purer spirits” becomes “evaporation of its finer spirits” in the wine analogy; its is supplied from wine. “Exhaled” becomes “breathed their last” in the Prince Henry comparison. The whole “exhale & evaporate like frankincense” is rendered “open up and give off their spirit like frankincense”; their spirit articulates the comparison rather than translating a separate original noun. The concessive “Et si” in the drinking quotation becomes “Even if,” qualifying the warning that companions can pressure someone despite the feared harm.

black fume · black fumes · local use 1

Printed “black fumes” (English; phrase).