Stone

Use in the book

The account of cold waters associates their condition with passage through moist rock, explaining that stone and especially such stone is cold. The word identifies the surrounding material in a causal explanation of water’s qualities. It does not name a precise rock species.

Places to read

1. I.39.1.7Moist rock is invoked to explain cold water.

Translation in this edition

“Stone” suits the material; “rock” is natural for the mass through which water flows.

Use in the book

The slate bed in Coëtquen gives the stream a blackish colour and thereby participates in the scene’s changing aesthetic judgment. Coastal granite has a more forceful role. Waves attack its black heads and fall back as foam; in the cove, scattered blocks seem suspended in an arrested fall. Their immobility is described as latent or continuing movement rather than complete repose.

Stone also establishes scale and vulnerability. Delicate Gothic work appears embroidered in air upon it, while fruits striking stones become an image of thoughts damaged in conversation. The same material can support extraordinary finesse or provide the hard surface against which living softness is bruised.

The separate 1861 account of a fatal fall makes the coast’s resistance tragically literal. Its rocks and tide prevent the family from carrying the body away immediately. That human danger must remain distinct from the main version’s delighted encounter with sonorous granite hollows.

Places to read

1. 19 March 1833 · ¶1Slate participates in the dark stream’s relation to the surrounding colours
2. 4 October 1833 · ¶1Massive stone enclosure contains architecture compared to delicate leaf veins
3. 8 December 1833 · ¶2Reefs resist and divide the movements of attacking waves
4. 8 December 1833 · ¶4Granite blocks appear perpetually on the edge of rolling
5. 8 December 1833 · ¶5 · 1861 variantSeparate 1861 witness: rock and high tide become practical obstacles after a fatal fall

Translation in this edition

The main cove passage translates quartiers énormes de granit as enormous blocks of granite. The English appropriately reads quartiers as pieces or blocks of material, not urban quarters; bariolés de mousses blanches becomes mottled with white moss.

Use in the book

Pseudo-Aristotle's Problems asks why hot waters form stone more readily than cold waters, answers through the loss of moisture under heat, and invokes Empedocles in connection with rocks, stones, and thermal waters. Plutarch instead reports that fire deep in the earth braces and supports exposed cliffs and rocks. The processes are distinct: formation by drying is not the same as continued support by underlying fire. Psellus adds only that Empedocles belonged among ancient authors who explained powers in stones, alongside Anaxagoras and Democritus. He gives no particular power or causal account here. This weak but real attribution should not be expanded into an Empedoclean mineral catalogue or magical lapidary. The group illustrates how a material term can gather physically related but textually uneven testimonia.

Places to read

1. A 69 (testimony)Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems. Connects stone formation with moisture-loss promoted by heat.
2. A 69 (testimony)Plutarch, On the Principle of Cold. Gives a separate explanation of the support of cliffs and rocks.
3. A 69 (testimony)Psellus, On Stones. Lists Empedocles among explainers of the powers of stones without detailing his theory.

Translation in this edition

The Problems is a work of the Aristotelian tradition, not secure personal testimony by Aristotle. The editorial summary “rock is water that has lost its moisture” overcompresses an account that speaks of moisture departing from a material without defining all rock simply as former water.