On Youth And Old Age, On Life And Death, On Breathing   

With water-clock of polished bronze a maiden sporting,

Sets on her comely hand the narrow of the tube

And dips it in the frail-formed water's silvery sheen;

Not then the flood the vessel enters, but the air,

Until she frees the crowded stream. But then indeed

Upon the escape runs in the water meet.

So also when within the vessel's deeps the water

Remains, the opening by the hand of flesh being closed,

The outer air that entrance craves restrains the flood

At the gates of the sounding narrow,

upon the surface pressing,

Until the maid withdraws her hand. But then in contrariwise

Once more the air comes in and water meet flows out.

Thus to the to the subtle blood, surging throughout the limbs,

Whene'er it shrinks away into the far recesses

Admits a stream of air rushing with swelling wave,

But, when it backward leaps, in like bulk air flows out.



This then is what he says of respiration. But, as we said, all

animals that evidently respire do so by means of the windpipe, when

they breathe either through the mouth or through the nostrils.

Hence, if it is of this kind of respiration that he is talking, we

must ask how it tallies with the explanation given. But the facts seem

to be quite opposed. The chest is raised in the manner of a

forge-bellows when the breath is drawn in-it is quite reasonable

that it should be heat which raises up and that the blood should

occupy the hot region-but it collapses and sinks down, like the

bellows once more, when the breath is let out. The difference is

that in a bellows it is not by the same channel that the air is

taken in and let out, but in breathing it is.

But, if Empedocles is accounting only for respiration through the

nostrils, he is much in error, for that does not involve the