This account of Epigenes is a tissue of falsehoods. To begin with the 1 nearest one, the last, it is not true that torch and beam meteors are due to the violent action of a whirlwind. The whirlwind is formed in the neighbourhood of the earth, and there it runs its course. This is the reason why it tears up trees by the roots, and wherever it swoops down it lays bare the soil, carrying off in the meanwhile woods and roofs of houses; as a rule, it is lower than the clouds, and assuredly never higher. But, on the contrary, it is the more exalted part of heaven that displays beam meteors, and so they never intervene between us and the clouds. Besides, a whirlwind is borne along more swiftly than any cloud, and rotates as on a pivot. And in addition to this, it 2 ceases all of a sudden, bursting by its own force. “Beams,” on the contrary, do not run or fly across, like torches, but remain shining for some time in the same quarter of the sky. Charimander, too, in the book he wrote on comets, asserts that a great and unusual light in the sky of the size of a large beam was once seen by Anaxagoras, and continued to shine for a long period. Callisthenes puts it on record that a similar appearance of a trail of fire was observed before the sea swallowed up Buris and Helice. Aristotle says it was not a “beam,” 3 but a comet; the characteristic dispersion of the fire was not seen at first on account of its excessive brightness, but, in process of time, when the glare began to die down, it recovered the distinctive appearance of a comet. In this fiery phenomenon there were many points worthy of remark, none more so than this, that, immediately it shone in the sky, the sea came over Buris and Helice. Did Aristotle, then, one 4 may ask, believe that not merely that beam but all beams are comets? Surely not, for there is this difference, that beams have their fire continuous, while in the other bodies it is dispersed. Beams have a regular flame, not interrupted or dull at any point, while in the end parts it is condensed, just like what Callisthenes describes the one to have been, to which I referred a moment ago. VI