第25章

Then, currents and not shocks are produced in the sea by the action of the winds. Again, it is so extensive that evaporations do not collect in it but issue from it, and these draw the evaporations from the earth after them. Islands near the continent really form part of it: the intervening sea is not enough to make any difference; but those in the open sea can only be shaken if the whole of the sea that surrounds them is shaken too.

We have now explained earthquakes, their nature and cause, and the most important of the circumstances attendant on their appearance.

9

Let us go on to explain lightning and thunder, and further whirlwind, fire-wind, and thunderbolts: for the cause of them all is the same.

As we have said, there are two kinds of exhalation, moist and dry, and the atmosphere contains them both potentially. It, as we have said before, condenses into cloud, and the density of the clouds is highest at their upper limit. (For they must be denser and colder on the side where the heat escapes to the upper region and leaves them.

This explains why hurricanes and thunderbolts and all analogous phenomena move downwards in spite of the fact that everything hot has a natural tendency upwards. Just as the pips that we squeeze between our fingers are heavy but often jump upwards: so these things are necessarily squeezed out away from the densest part of the cloud.) Now the heat that escapes disperses to the up region.

But if any of the dry exhalation is caught in the process as the air cools, it is squeezed out as the clouds contract, and collides in its rapid course with the neighbouring clouds, and the sound of this collision is what we call thunder. This collision is analogous, to compare small with great, to the sound we hear in a flame which men call the laughter or the threat of Hephaestus or of Hestia. This occurs when the wood dries and cracks and the exhalation rushes on the flame in a body. So in the clouds, the exhalation is projected and its impact on dense clouds causes thunder: the variety of the sound is due to the irregularity of the clouds and the hollows that intervene where their density is interrupted. This then, is thunder, and this its cause.

It usually happens that the exhalation that is ejected is inflamed and burns with a thin and faint fire: this is what we call lightning, where we see as it were the exhalation coloured in the act of its ejection. It comes into existence after the collision and the thunder, though we see it earlier because sight is quicker than hearing. The rowing of triremes illustrates this: the oars are going back again before the sound of their striking the water reaches us.

However, there are some who maintain that there is actually fire in the clouds. Empedocles says that it consists of some of the sun's rays which are intercepted: Anaxagoras that it is part of the upper ether (which he calls fire) which has descended from above. Lightning, then, is the gleam of this fire, and thunder the hissing noise of its extinction in the cloud.

But this involves the view that lightning actually is prior to thunder and does not merely appear to be so. Again, this intercepting of the fire is impossible on either theory, but especially it is said to be drawn down from the upper ether. Some reason ought to be given why that which naturally ascends should descend, and why it should not always do so, but only when it is cloudy. When the sky is clear there is no lightning: to say that there is, is altogether wanton.

The view that the heat of the sun's rays intercepted in the clouds is the cause of these phenomena is equally unattractive: this, too, is a most careless explanation. Thunder, lightning, and the rest must have a separate and determinate cause assigned to them on which they ensue. But this theory does nothing of the sort. It is like supposing that water, snow, and hail existed all along and were produced when the time came and not generated at all, as if the atmosphere brought each to hand out of its stock from time to time.

They are concretions in the same way as thunder and lightning are discretions, so that if it is true of either that they are not generated but pre-exist, the same must be true of the other. Again, how can any distinction be made about the intercepting between this case and that of interception in denser substances such as water?

Water, too, is heated by the sun and by fire: yet when it contracts again and grows cold and freezes no such ejection as they describe occurs, though it ought on their the. to take place on a proportionate scale. Boiling is due to the exhalation generated by fire: but it is impossible for it to exist in the water beforehand; and besides they call the noise 'hissing', not 'boiling'. But hissing is really boiling on a small scale: for when that which is brought into contact with moisture and is in process of being extinguished gets the better of it, then it boils and makes the noise in question. Some-Cleidemus is one of them-say that lightning is nothing objective but merely an appearance. They compare it to what happens when you strike the sea with a rod by night and the water is seen to shine. They say that the moisture in the cloud is beaten about in the same way, and that lightning is the appearance of brightness that ensues.

This theory is due to ignorance of the theory of reflection, which is the real cause of that phenomenon. The water appears to shine when struck because our sight is reflected from it to some bright object: hence the phenomenon occurs mainly by night: the appearance is not seen by day because the daylight is too in, tense and obscures it.

These are the theories of others about thunder and lightning: some maintaining that lightning is a reflection, the others that lightning is fire shining through the cloud and thunder its extinction, the fire not being generated in each case but existing beforehand. We say that the same stuff is wind on the earth, and earthquake under it, and in the clouds thunder. The essential constituent of all these phenomena is the same: namely, the dry exhalation. If it flows in one direction it is wind, in another it causes earthquakes; in the clouds, when they are in a process of change and contract and condense into water, it is ejected and causes thunder and lightning and the other phenomena of the same nature.

So much for thunder and lightning.