X.
WHY DO MEN POUR SEA-WATER UPON WINE, AND SAY THE FISHERMEN HAD AN ORACLE GIVEN THEM, WHEREBY THEY WERE BID TO DIP BACCHUS INTO THE SEA? AND WHY DO THEY THAT LIVE FAR FROM THE SEA CAST IN SOME ZACYNTHIAN EARTH TOASTED?
WHETHER that heat is good against cold? Or that it quenches heat, by diluting the wine and destroying its strength? Or that the aqueous and aerial part of wine (which is therefore prone to mutation) is stayed by the throwing in of terrene parts, whose nature it is to constipate and condense? Moreover, salts with the sea-water, attenuating and colliquating whatever is foreign and superfluous, suffer no fetidness or putrefaction to breed. Besides, the gross and terrene parts, being entangled with the heavy and sinking together, make a sediment or lees, and so make the wine fine.
Quaestiones Naturales. Plutarch. ed. William W. Goodwin. Boston. 1874.
Funding provided by The National Endowment for the Humanities.