20 



ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEM. 



[Ch. II. 



om 



into cavities in the earth, where they had become petrified. 

 The same writer, treating of fossil ivory and bones, sup- 

 posed them to be produced by a certain plastic virtue latent 



in our earth. 

 Opinions of 



om 



the works now extant of 



Aristotle, and from the system of Pythagoras, as above ex- 

 posed, we might certainly infer that these philosophers con- 

 sidered the agents of change now operating in nature, as 

 capable of bringing about in the lapse of ages a complete 

 revolution ; and the Stagyrite even considers occasional ca- 



nature 



time^ 

 The deluge of 



Deucalion, he says, affected Greece only, and principally the 



i. „n~j xr^n^c on^ if a-rnsp. from preat inundations of 



-x- 



part called Hellas, 



rivers during a rainy winter. But such extraordinary winters, 

 he says, though after a certain period they return, do not 

 always revisit the same places. 



Censorinus quotes it as Aristotle's opinion, that there were 

 general inundations of the globe, and that they alternated 

 with conflagrations; and that the flood constituted the 

 winter of the great year, or astronomical cycle, while the 

 conflagration, or destruction by fire, is the summer or period 

 of greatest heat.f If this passage, as Lipsius supposes, be 



am 



Meteorics,' it is a gross misr 



the Stagyrite, for the general bearing of his reasoning in 

 that treatise tends clearly m an opposite direction.^ 



He 



to many exam 

 insists empha 



He 



9 



produce in the lapse of ages. _ 



of lakes that had dried up, and deserts that had at lengtn 

 become watered by rivers and fertilised. He points to the 

 growth of the Nilotic Delta since the time of Homer, to the 

 shallowing of the Pains Ma.otis within sixty years from Ins 

 own time ; and although, in the same chapter, he says nothing 

 of changes in the relative level of land and sea, yet in other 

 parts of the same treatise he speaks of such events m con- 



* Meteor, lib. i. cap. 12. 



f De Die Nat. 







