ABSTRACT
The reader of a treatise on meteorology, whether ancient, medieval, or even classical, is immediately struck by some features that are, at first glance, paradoxical. Whereas, according to Aristotle, this is a discipline that should not be confused with any other, and which deals with all phenomena concerning the four elements “which we may consider as accidents”, 1 yet this discipline deals with such a wide variety of subjects that it can be defined only negatively. We encounter in it the most diverse phenomena, which today belong to sciences as different as astronomy, geography, chemistry, seismology, volcanology, meteorology, and optics. All efforts to identify a unifying principle - exhalation, for example - behind this variety are condemned to defeat in advance, or at the very least to arbitrarily excluding part of the Stagirite’s Meteorologica as apocryphal. On the contrary, it is as though this diversity was in accordance with the Stagirite’s intentions, in so far as he seems to have wished to relegate to the Meteorologica all the sublunary phenomena which were not retained in the physical treatises: the Physics, On the Heavens, and On Generation and Corruption. This situation, created by the philosopher, lasted more than two millennia, as is still attested by Descartes’ Les Meteores.
