336 PHYSICAL SCIENCE 



which have no connection whatever with mining. 1 But the 

 narrative served Seneca s purpose, since it furnished him with the 

 occasion for a diatribe against the cursed love of gold, which had 

 apparently been rampant in days long before those of Philip, 

 and allowed him to supply from his own imagination some addi 

 tional lurid horrors of the underground world. 



When he gets back to his subject, he enters upon an enumera 

 tion of the various winds known to the ancients. He himself 

 thinks that as the heavens are divided into twelve sections, so 

 there are twelve distinct winds, not all felt everywhere, but never 

 exceeding that number. He does not attempt, however, to 

 account for them. In his reference to the names given to the 

 various winds, he gives a quotation from Ovid s Metamorphoses, 

 in which the more conspicuous winds from the different quarters 

 are mentioned. To this quotation he adds a line from Virgil s 

 graphic picture of the storm in the first book of the Aeneid, where 

 Aeolus opens his cave and the south-east, south, and south-west 

 winds rush out in fury upon the sea. Seneca remarks, in passing, 

 that such a collocation of winds as Virgil enumerates could 

 never have happened in a single tempest. The poet, however, 

 has made no mistake. In a great cyclonic storm the wind 

 veers round with the compass from south-east by south to south 

 west. And even if Virgil had added the north wind, which the 

 philosopher says he left out, he would only have followed the 

 invariable course of the winds in the cyclones of the northern 

 hemisphere, which circle round towards the north as the storm 

 area is passing eastward. 



In conclusion, the author points out the teleological signifi 

 cance of the winds, and is thence led to repeat the time-honoured 

 reproach against human iniquity which turns the winds from 

 their beneficent intention to purposes of war. 



BOOK VI 



This is, perhaps, the most valuable part of the volume, for it 

 contains more of the author s own observations than the rest of 

 the work. It deals more particularly with the great earthquake 

 of 5th February A.D. 63, which occurred in his own country, 

 and about which he could collect information at first hand. As 

 already mentioned, the subject of earthquakes had long fascinated 



1 It is possible that these ancient mines were driven in search of metal 

 seams or veins traversing limestone, like those of lead among the caverned 

 limestones of Derbyshire. 



