كتاب الحيوان (Book of Animals)

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of the smelting and the stages of cooking, and the disparity between unleavened and leavened bread, and between the one who falls short and the one who exceeds. The seat of the intellect is an organ among those organs and a part among those parts, just like the disparity between the Saqaliba Slavs and the Zanj people of East Africa. The same applies to [physical] forms and the positions of the organs. Do you not see that the people of China and Tibet and the masters of crafts have [in those fields] gentleness, skill, subtlety of approach, breadth, and the ability to dive into their mysterious and distant aspects, yet they have nothing else? It may be that a door is opened for a people in the field of crafts, but nothing else is opened for them.

He said: He used to criticize them for their saying that heat causes dryness, because heat should only cause hotness and generate what is similar to it, and it does not generate another species that is not part of it in anything. If it were permissible that it generate from the genera that differ from it a single form, then that difference would not be more deserving of [this classification] than another statement—unless they go by the way of metaphor. A man might say: "I saw you because I turned," while he only saw him because of a nature in the sight that perceived [it] at the time of that turning.

For this reason, he says: We may find fire entering the water of the qumqum a narrow-necked flask or vessel through the heating beneath it. When the fire enters the water, it comes into contact with it and connects with the heat within it. The fire rises to cause boiling due to the movement of the fire that has entered its interstices; its movement is upward. When the parts of the fire stop, fine elements of those moistures that have been in contact with it fall with them. If that heating by the fire entering the water continues, the parts of the moistures in contact with the parts of the fire rise, and because of the strength of the fire's movement and its seeking the upper realm, this occurs. So, when someone who has no knowledge finds [the contents] at the bottom of the flask like sediment, or finds the remaining water salty when its fine elements rise—similar to what happens to sea water—he thinks that it is the fire that gave it dryness. If they claim that the fire is the dryer in the sense of what we have explained, then they are correct; but if they go beyond metaphor, they are mistaken.

Likewise, when heat is established in bodies, it stimulates the moistures and comes into contact with them. When it is strong enough to exit, it drives them out from them. Upon the exit of the moistures, the bodies are found to be dry. It is not that heat can have any action other than heating, rising, and turning toward rising from rising, just as the reliance is from the form of the decline. Likewise, the water that flows to the sea from all the surfaces of the earth and its depths—when it reaches that great pit, the water is a washer and a solvent. The earth casts into it what it has of saltiness, and what comes out to it from the earth of the parts...