Αἴτια φυσικά

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Yunanca Yunanca

9 Is it that the bitterness of the sea is not devoid of all sweetness, as receiving so many rivers into it; but, since the sun exhales the sweet and potable water thereof, arising to the top by reason of its levity, and since this is done in summer more than in winter, when it affects the sea more weakly by reason of the debility of its heat, that so in winter a great deal of sweetness is left, which tempers and mitigates its excessive poisonous bitterness? And the same thing befalls potable waters; for in summer they are worse, the sun wasting the lightest and sweetest part of them. And a fresh sweetness returns in winter, of which the sea must needs participate, since it moves, and is carried with the rivers into the sea.

X. WHY DO MEN POUR SEA-WATER UPON WINE, AND SAY THE FISHERMEN HAD AN ORACLE GIVEN THEM, WHEREBY THEY WERE BID TO DIP BACCHUS INTO THE SEA? AND WHY DO THEY THAT LIVE FAR FROM THE SEA CAST IN SOME ZACYNTHIAN EARTH TOASTED?

10 WHETHER that heat is good against cold? Or that it quenches heat, by diluting the wine and destroying its strength? Or that the aqueous and aerial part of wine (which is therefore prone to mutation) is stayed by the throwing in of terrene parts, whose nature it is to constipate and condense? Moreover, salts with the sea-water, attenuating and colliquating whatever is foreign and superfluous, suffer no fetidness or putrefaction to breed. Besides, the gross and terrene parts, being entangled with the heavy and sinking together, make a sediment or lees, and so make the wine fine.