Classical names for the winds were almost universally employed. The distinction between cardinal and collateral which was made by William of Conches goes back to the Greeks,[774] who had conceived of four cardinal and four, six, seven, or eight collateral winds. Seneca’s[775] rose of twelve winds, the idea of which in its essentials had been derived from Posidonius, Timosthenes, and, ultimately, from Aristotle, was adopted by Isidore, who passed it on to the Middle Ages, though terrible confusion (which, happily, it is not necessary for us to unravel) reigned at all times regarding the names employed to designate its elements.[776] In addition to the classical terms, our modern names were already familiar. In the Ghent manuscript of Lambert of St. Omer’s _Liber floridus_[777] there is a diagram in which the winds are called “ost-ost,” “sud-ost,” “sud-sud,” “sud-west,” “west-west,” “nord-west,” “nord-nord,” and “nord-ost.” This terminology was used in the time of Charlemagne[778] and is probably of Anglo-Saxon origin,[779] although it has been suggested that the terms are corruptions of Latin words—“ost” from “Augustus;” “ovest,” or “west,” from “ob est;” “nord” from “novus arctus,” etc.[780] _Qualities of the Winds_ To the various winds classical and medieval writers liked to attribute qualities—or, at any rate, descriptive adjectives, “cold” or “hot,” “dry” or “damp,” “stormy” or “calm,” and the like—but there was little enough uniformity in making these distinctions. Some writers of our period seem to have been content merely to repeat what had been said in classical times; others, like William of Conches or Giraldus Cambrensis, showed more independence. Boreas was probably universally regarded as cold and Auster as hot, but beyond this we cannot generalize.[781] William of Conches[782] conceived of the winds as partaking of the qualities of the regions over which they blow: Auster, coming from the South Pole and hence originally frigid like Boreas, in its passage across the torrid, equatorial zone becomes hot and dry—an observation which may perhaps be founded on some knowledge of the _sirocco_ of the Mediterranean. On the other hand, Giraldus Cambrensis, undoubtedly from personal acquaintance with the water-laden south and southwest gales of the British Isles, calls Auster damp and rainy in winter. Similarly Giraldus breaks with classical tradition when he speaks of the east wind, or Eurus, as pure and clear, a bringer of fair summer weather, strikingly different from Zephyr, wet and cloudy from the sea.[783] _Local Winds_