The term hotter is used then in all the various senses that
have been mentioned, and perhaps in still more. Now it is impossible
for one body to be hotter than another in all these different
fashions. Boiling water for instance, though it is more scalding
than flame, yet has no power of burning or melting combustible or
fusible matter, while flame has. So again this boiling water is hotter
than a small fire, and yet gets cold more rapidly and completely.
For in fact fire never becomes cold; whereas water invariably does so.
Boiling water, again, is hotter to the touch than oil; yet it gets
cold and solid more rapidly than this other fluid. Blood, again, is
hotter to the touch than either water or oil, and yet coagulates
before them. Iron, again, and stones and other similar bodies are
longer in getting heated than water, but when once heated burn other
substances with a much greater intensity. Another distinction is this.
In some of the bodies which are called hot the heat is derived from
without, while in others it belongs to the bodies themselves; and it
makes a most important difference whether the heat has the former or
the latter origin. For to call that one of two bodies the hotter,
which is possessed of heat, we may almost say, accidentally and not of
its own essence, is very much the same thing as if, finding that
some man in a fever was a musician, one were to say that musicians are
hotter than healthy men.
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