Decisiones praecipuorum aliquot aporēmatōn iatrophilosophikōn

is most common to the corrupted; since there is no mixture which, as a mixture (if it decays according to nature κατὰ φύσιν, and not by force τῇ βίᾳ, as the Herculean knots of Hugo and Vicomercatus were correctly solved by Buccaferrea for Aristotle), does not, when finally dissolved by putrefaction, cease to be a mixture. And other corruptions are either violent or a "way to non-putrefaction" ἀσέψις ὁδός, such as old age and exhaustion, which are corruptions of animate beings as they are animate. For as simple generation ἁπλῆ γένεσις occurs by the definition of the moist with the dry (these are the passive powers) by the hot and cold (these being the active powers) acting upon the underlying matter (for from these it was born, and the dry was defined by the moist, while the active powers were working), it occurs so that they obtain a certain and suitable ratio of the mixture to be generated (for those things proposed by Aristotle, 5 Physics ch. 7, book On Life and Death ch. 1, and book 1 On Generation and Corruption ch. 4, are "fitting to the end"). Thus putrefaction occurs by the disjunction of the moist from the dry, when "what is being defined is mastered by the definer, through the environment." Hence, the moistness according to nature is evaporated together συνεξατμίζεται as the internal heat departs, due as much to the internal cold of the mixture as to the external heat eliciting the internal; since there is nothing that can hold or delay the humor so that it does not make a divorce from the dry, once the reins by which it was held are loosened. "For all things that putrefy become first moist, then drier, and finally earth and dung." But who does not see that the conditions of putrefaction cannot apply to earthworms? Thus Aristotle also illuminates for us in 3 On the Generation of Animals, ch. 11, and 5 History of Animals, ch. 19, and leads us into the hidden mysteries of nature: "Of those things generated spontaneously," he says, "a small part is putrefying, but the rest is being digested; but putrefaction, or the putrid thing, is the excrement of what has been digested." Worms, therefore, are born by the coagulation σύγκρεισιν of raw residue, which, as a mixture, is rather violently or naturally corrupted, from moist heat, but not dry; otherwise burning κατάκαυσις would occur. Aristotle is the authority that by this process Pyraustas insects said to live in fire are generated in the copper furnaces of Cyprus, where chalcitis is burned. That which also happens in Egypt at Cairo, where the inhabitants construct furnaces with a multiple arched roof: in the center of the highest vault there is a hole,