第72章

What then? Nor is there unto thee a need Of such long ways and roundabout, nor boots it For me much toil on this to spend.More fit It is in few words briefly to embrace Things many: things whose textures fall together So mutually adapt, that cavities To solids correspond, these cavities Of this thing to the solid parts of that, And those of that to solid parts of this-Such joinings are the best.Again, some things Can be the one with other coupled and held, Linked by hooks and eyes, as 'twere; and this Seems more the fact with iron and this stone.

Now, of diseases what the law, and whence The Influence of bane upgathering can Upon the race of man and herds of cattle Kindle a devastation fraught with death, I will unfold.And, first, I've taught above That seeds there be of many things to us Life-giving, and that, contrariwise, there must Fly many round bringing disease and death.

When these have, haply, chanced to collect And to derange the atmosphere of earth, The air becometh baneful.And, lo, all That Influence of bane, that pestilence, Or from Beyond down through our atmosphere, Like clouds and mists, descends, or else collects From earth herself and rises, when, a-soak And beat by rains unseasonable and suns, Our earth hath then contracted stench and rot.

Seest thou not, also, that whoso arrive In region far from fatherland and home Are by the strangeness of the clime and waters Distempered?- since conditions vary much.

For in what else may we suppose the clime Among the Britons to differ from Aegypt's own (Where totters awry the axis of the world), Or in what else to differ Pontic clime From Gades' and from climes adown the south, On to black generations of strong men With sun-baked skins? Even as we thus do see Four climes diverse under the four main-winds And under the four main-regions of the sky, So, too, are seen the colour and face of men Vastly to disagree, and fixed diseases To seize the generations, kind by kind:

There is the elephant-disease which down In midmost Aegypt, hard by streams of Nile, Engendered is- and never otherwhere.

In Attica the feet are oft attacked, And in Achaean lands the eyes.And so The divers spots to divers parts and limbs Are noxious; 'tis a variable air That causes this.Thus when an atmosphere, Alien by chance to us, begins to heave, And noxious airs begin to crawl along, They creep and wind like unto mist and cloud, Slowly, and everything upon their way They disarrange and force to change its state.

It happens, too, that when they've come at last Into this atmosphere of ours, they taint And make it like themselves and alien.

Therefore, asudden this devastation strange, This pestilence, upon the waters falls, Or settles on the very crops of grain Or other meat of men and feed of flocks.

Or it remains a subtle force, suspense In the atmosphere itself; and when therefrom We draw our inhalations of mixed air, Into our body equally its bane Also we must suck in.In manner like, Oft comes the pestilence upon the kine, And sickness, too, upon the sluggish sheep.

Nor aught it matters whether journey we To regions adverse to ourselves and change The atmospheric cloak, or whether nature Herself import a tainted atmosphere To us or something strange to our own use Which can attack us soon as ever it come.