Airs Waters Places (9-12)

Such are the properties of rain waters, and of those from snow and ice. Stone, kidney disease, strangury and sciatica are very apt to attack people, and ruptures occur, when they drink water of very many different kinds, or from large rivers, into which other rivers flow, or from a lake fed by many streams of various sorts, and whenever they use foreign waters coming from a great, not a short, distance. For one water cannot be like another; some are sweet, others are impregnated with salt and alum, others flow from hot springs. These when mixed up together disagree, and the strongest always prevails. But the strongest is not always the same; sometimes it is one, sometimes another, according to the winds. One has its strength from a north wind, another from the south wind, and similarly with the others. Such waters then must leave a sediment of mud and sand in the vessels, and drinking them causes the diseases mentioned before. That there are exceptions I will proceed to set forth.

Those whose bowels are loose and healthy, whose bladder is not feverish, and the mouth of whose bladder is not over narrow, pass water easily, and no

This, or something very like this, is the truth concerning these matters. As to the seasons, a consideration of the following points will make it possible to decide whether the year will prove unhealthy or healthy. If the signs prove normal when the stars set and rise; if there be rains in autumn, if the winter be moderate, neither too mild nor unseasonably cold, and if the rains be seasonable in spring and in summer, the year is likely to be very healthy. If, on the other hand, the winter prove dry and northerly, the spring rainy and southerly, the summer cannot fail to be feverladen, causing ophthalmia and dysenteries. For whenever the great heat comes on suddenly while the earth is soaked by reason of the spring rains and the south wind, the heat cannot fail to be doubled, coming from the hot, sodden earth and the burning sun; men’s bowels not being braced nor their brain dried—for when spring is such the body and its flesh must necessarily be flabby—the fevers that attack are of the acutest type in all cases, especially among the phlegmatic. Dysenteries are also likely to come upon women and the most humid constitutions. If at the rising of the Dog Star stormy rain occurs and the Etesian winds blow, there is hope that the distempers will cease and that the autumn will be healthy. Otherwise there is danger lest deaths

By studying and observing after this fashion one may foresee most of the consequences of the changes. One should be especially on one’s guard against the most violent changes of the seasons, and unless compelled one should neither purge, nor apply cautery or knife to the bowels, before at least ten days are past. The following are the four most violent changes and the most dangerous:—both solstices, especially the summer solstice, both the equinoxes, so reckoned, especially the autumnal. One must also guard against the risings of the stars, especially of the Dog Star, then of Arcturus, and also of the setting of the Pleiades. For it is especially at these times that diseases come to a crisis. Some prove fatal, some come to an end, all others change to another form and another constitution.

So much for the changes of the seasons. Now I intend to compare Asia[*] and Europe, and to show how they differ in every respect, and how the nations of the one differ entirely in physique from those of the other. It would take too long to describe them all, so I will set forth my views about the most important and the greatest differences. I hold that Asia differs very widely from Europe in the