Another method of cooling water also seems to have been known to Plutarch. It consisted in throwing into it small pebbles or plates of lead[393]. The author refers to the testimony of Aristotle; but this circumstance I cannot find in the works of that philosopher which have been preserved. It seems to be too unintelligible to admit of any opinion being formed upon it; and the explanation given by Plutarch conveys still less information than the proposition itself. This is the case, in general, with almost all the propositions of the ancients. We indeed learn from the questions that they were acquainted with many phænomena; but the answers scarcely ever repay the trouble which one must employ in order to understand them. They seldom contain any further illustration; and never a satisfactory explanation. It appears that the practice of cooling liquors, at the tables of the great, was not usual in any country besides Italy and the neighbouring states, before the end of the sixteenth century. In the middle of that century there were no ice-cellars in France; for when Bellon relates, in the Account of his travels, in 1553, how snow and ice were preserved at Constantinople throughout the whole summer, for the purpose of cooling sherbet, he assures us that the like method might be adopted by his countrymen; because he had found ice-cellars in countries warmer than France. The word _glacière_ also is not to be met with in the older dictionaries; and it does not occur even in that of Monet, printed in 1635[394]. Champier, the physician who attended Francis I. when he had a conference with the emperor Charles V. and pope Paul III. at Nice, saw the Spaniards and Italians put snow, which they caused to be brought from the neighbouring mountains, into their wine in order to cool it. That practice, which excited his astonishment, he declared to be unhealthful; and this proves that in his time it had not been introduced at the French court[395].