204 THE NATURE OF THE GODS.and equable motion. And as long as this motion remains

in us, so long does sense and life remain ; but the moment that it abates and is extinguished, we ourselves decay and perish. By arguments like these, Cleanthes shows how great is the power of heat in all bodies. He observes that there is no food so gross as not to be digested in a night and a day ; and that even in the excrementitious parts, which nature rejects, there remains a heat. The veins and ar teries seem, by their continual quivering, to resemble tho agitation of fire ; and it has often been observed when the heart of an animal is just plucked from the body that it palpitates with such visible motion as to resemble the ra pidity of fire. Everything, therefore, that has life, wheth er it be animal or vegetable, owes that life to the heat in herent in it ; it is this nature of heat which contains in it self the vital power which extends throughout the whole world. This will appear more clearly on a more close ex planation of this fiery quality, which pervades all things. Every division, then, of the world (and I shall touch upon the most considerable) is sustained by heat; and first it may be observed in earthly substances that fire is produced from stones by striking or rubbing one against another ; that " the warm earth smokes '" when just turned up, and that water is drawn warm from well-springs ; and this is most especially the case in the winter season, be cause there is a great quantity of heat contained in the caverns of the earth ; and this becomes more dense in the winter, and on that account confines more closely the in nate heat which is discoverable in the earth. X. It would require a long dissertation, and many rea sons would require to be adduced, to show that all the seeds which the earth conceives, and all those which it contains having been generated from itself, and fixed in roots and trunks, derive all their origin and increase from the temperature and regulation of heat. And that even every liquor has a mixture of heat in it is plainly demon strated by the effusion of water ; for it would not congeal by cold, nor become solid, as ice or snow, and return again

This, in the original, is a fragment of an old Latin verse, 

Terrain fnmarc cdlentem.