54 FABLE OF CUPID. 



wander, try their powers, and are tried. Lastly, if you con 

 sider its genial and vivifying power, which conducts you to 

 the elements of things and manifests them, they seem to be 

 also the more excellent parts of the air, so that the words 

 air, spirit, and life, are often used as if they were synony 

 mous. And, with reason, since some degree of respiration 

 seems the inseparable companion of life a little more 

 advanced (excepting those little beginnings of life in em 

 bryos and in eggs), so that fishes are suffocated by the 

 congealing of water. Also fire itself, unless kept alive by 

 the surrounding body of air, is extinguished, and seems 

 only worn out air irritated and inflamed ; as water, on the 

 other hand, can appear to be the conjunction and reception 

 of air. Nor is there any necessity to maintain that the 

 earth constantly exhales the air, nor that it passes through 

 water into the form of air. But Heraclitus, who was more 

 acute, but not so much to be relied upon, held fire to be 

 the element of things. For it was not a middle nature, 

 which is wont to be extremely uncertain and corruptible, 

 but the highest and most perfect nature, which is a consi 

 derable bound, as it were, to corruption and change, which 

 Heraclitus sought for instituting the origin of things. Now 

 he saw that the greatest variety and perturbation of things 

 was found in solid and consistent bodies. For such bodies 

 can be organic and, as it were, a kind of machines, which 

 acquire innumerable variations according to their shape, as 

 the bodies of animals and plants. Even among these, such as 

 are not organic upon a closer inspection, are found to be very 

 dissimilar. For how great is the dissimilarity between those 

 very parts of animals which are called similar? the brain, 

 the chrystalline humour, the white of the eye, the bones, 

 membranes, cartilages, nerves, veins, flesh, fat, marrow, 

 blood, sperm, breath, chyle, and the rest ; also between the 

 parts of vegetables, roots, barks, stalks, leaves, flowers, seeds, 

 and the like? But fossils are not certainly organic, but yet 

 are variously mixed together in one kind, and show mutually 

 a very great variety. Wherefore that base of the diversity 

 of entities, so vast, so broad, so extended, in which so vast 

 an apparatus of things is manifested and is constantly pre 

 sent, seems to be fixed in a solid and constant nature. 

 But the power of formation seems plainly to desert the 

 bodies of liquids. For there is not found in all nature one 

 animal or plant in a body of mere fluid. That infinite 

 variety of form therefore is cut oft&quot; and taken away from 

 the nature of liquid. No small variety however does 



