Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
According to Lin (1949, p. 120), the editor of the treatise, this tail-gate (Wei-Lou or Wei Lu)
is a mythical hole in the bottom or end of the ocean; this depletion mechanism to balance
the river inflows is clearly different from the Hippon-Thales seawater filtration mechanism
and from Aristotle's evaporation. The same issue was touched upon in the topic
L u Shi
Qun Qiu
(or Lu-Shih-Chun-Chiu), written a few decades later during the Qin (or Chin)
dynasty by a team of scholars under Prime Minister Lu Bu Wei (or Lu Buwei, d. 235 BCE)
(P. K. Wang, 1996; personal communication, 2000), in the following passage (Needham,
1959, p. 467).
The waters flow eastwards from their sources, resting neither by day nor by night. Down they come
inexhaustibly, yet the deeps are never full. The small (streams) become large and the heavy (waters in
the sea) become light (and mount to the clouds). This is (part of) the Rotation of the Tao.
The terms within brackets probably represent the interpretation of the text by the translators;
but this interpretation is not unreasonable and it would be difficult to come up with a different
meaning. Thus here the invoked evaporation mechanism is the same as Aristotle's, and the
authors clearly have some kind of hydrologic cycle in mind.
The problem was to continue to receive much attention throughout Western history,
and this preoccupation stemmed directly from (1, 7) in Ecclesiastes (
Oxford Study Edition
,
1976) as follows
All streams run into the sea, yet the sea never overflows; back to the place from which the streams ran
they return to run again.
Ecclesiastes dates from the third century, about a century after the death of Aristotle and
of Alexander (the Great), when Hellenistic influences had been spreading like wildfire all
over the Mediterranean world. The first part of this passage is so reminiscent of Aristotle's,
that one has to wonder if the author of Ecclesiastes somehow had not been affected by
Greek ideas. Ecclesiastes, like all the other Wisdom topics, probably originated in the
Jewish diaspora following the Babylonian exile, and possibly even in Alexandria, the very
center of Hellenism. To be sure, the topic is generally acknowledged to be quite different
in literary style from the earlier topics of the Hebrew Bible, and it has even been said that
some ancient rabbis were distressed by its pessimism. On the other hand, however, the
description in the second part is not quite the same as the explanation given by Aristotle.
Aristotle unequivocally attributes the fact that the sea does not overflow to evaporation; in
Ecclesiastes the way by which “they return” is not specified, but one cannot help inferring
some kind of seawater filtration mechanism. At any rate, this passage shows that the “old
difficulty” was of concern in Judaism. This preoccupation was also shared later by most
Christian writers, and it was to endure well into the Middle Ages. But the theme kept
recurring: Dobson (1777) contended that his data supported the wisdom in this biblical
passage and, as recently as 1877, Huxley (1900, p. 74) used the passage in his description
of the hydrologic cycle.
14.2.3 The Later Peripatetics
Upon Alexander's death in 323, Aristotle decided to leave Athens and he handed over the
leadership of the Peripatetic School at the Lyceum to Theophrastos (
c
. 372-287 BCE). From
the present vantage point, it would appear that Aristotle's
Meteorologica
continued to be
held in high esteem because it was an essential part of the Aristotelian body of works, as
it came to the Arab world and later to Western Europe in the thirteenth century. Evidently,
however, not all the ideas of the old master were accepted uncritically later on by his
successors, and some of them even seem to have been rejected outright. For instance, in the
