The Egyptians have recognised four elements also; and they then form each into two, male and female. The atmosphere they consider male where it is windy, female where it is cloudy and sluggish. They call the sea manly water, every other kind of water they call womanly. Fire they call masculine where a flame is burning, and feminine where there is a glow that is harmless to touch. The firmer kinds of earth, such as boulders and crags, they call male, reserving the term female for the parts that are amenable to cultivation. XV There is but one sea, which has so existed no doubt from the 1 beginning of things. It has sources of its own, from which its impulses and tides are derived. As with the raging sea, so with this gentler kind of water, there is a vast supply[55] in secret, which no river course can drain dry. The exact explanation of its reserve strength has not yet been discovered. It is only the superfluous portion of it that is released. Now, there are some of these beliefs to which 2 we may safely subscribe; but I hold this further opinion. My firm conviction is that the earth is organised by nature much after the plan of our bodies, in which there are both veins and arteries, the former blood-vessels, the latter air-vessels. In the earth likewise 3 there are some routes by which water passes, and some by which air. So exactly alike is the resemblance to our bodies in nature’s formation of the earth, that our ancestors have spoken of veins (= springs) of water. Again, in our bodies there is not merely blood, but many other kinds of moisture, some essential to life, others tainted and somewhat thick--brain in the head, marrow in the bones, mucus, saliva, tears, and a kind of lubricating substance that suffuses the joints, and enables them to turn more quickly (= synovial fluid). [55] All the texts give _via_ = way. The obvious correction is _vis_ = amount, supply. Gercke confirms this correction.