The Twofold Exhalation. Aristotle explains in Book I of the Meteorologica that the heat of the sun causes the earth to give off an exhalation , which is of two kinds. One kind, derived from the moisture within the earth and on its surface, is a moist vapour , ‘potentially like water’ ; the other, which comes from the earth itself, is hot, dry, and smoky, highly combustible ‘like a fuel’ , ‘the most inflammable of substances’ , ‘potentially like fire’ (...) , and compounded of Air and Earth. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to elucidate certain difficulties in the text of the Eryxias and to make the author's position as a thinker clearer than it has hitherto been. The Eryxias is a work which has suffered severely from excessive partisanship. While German and Dutch scholars of the eighteenth century appear to have valued it highly—a great deal too highly—as a work of enlightened ethical purpose, the scholarship of the nineteenth century was almost unanimous in condemning it as (...) an inept imitation of Plato's early writings. It soon became apparent, however, that it was not a mere imitation. The economist Hagen recognized in it traces of Stoic doctrine and proceeded somewhat hastily to the conclusion that the author was ‘a Stoic … who expressed the sentiments of his school in the form of a Platonic dialogue.’ Otto Schrohl of Göttingen, whose thesis is the most considerable work on the subject, is less emphatic in claiming the author as a Stoic, but nevertheless traces most of his ideas to Stoic and Cynic origins. This view is modified but retained in its essentials by Professor Souilhé in the Budé edition of Plato. While stressing the importance of the Platonic element, he agrees that the author's point of view has been influenced by Stoic and Cynic teaching, the influence of Cynicism being in his opinion predominant. (shrink)

The notes that follow are concerned with certain mineralogical problems which could not be discussed at length in my edition of the De Lapidibus . For the most part, only the bare conclusions are stated there. In handling these problems I owe much to the discussions that I had during his lifetime with Dr. Stanley Smith, and to those that I have had more recently with Professor F. Coles Phillips and Mr. Robert H. S. Robertson.