Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/39

 f. On Lucretius. 29 all editors, from Lambinus to Bernays, seem to have vied with one another in corrupting. From 485, Lucretius has been proving, by a variety of arguments that his atoms are " of solid singleness," everlasting and unchangeable ; that, to use the words of Newton near the end of his Optics, " these primitive particles being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces. While the particles continue entire, they may compose bodies of one and the same texture in all ages; but should they wear or break in pieces, the nature of things depend- ing on them would be changed.... And therefore that nature may be lasting, the changes of corporeal things are to be placed only in the various separations, and new associations and motions of these permanent particles, compound bodies being apt to break not in the midst of solid particles, but where those particles are laid together." He now, 599, &c. introduces by turn porro, " once again," his concluding argument to prove that his atoms are indestructible, by shewing that while they have parts, as they must have in order to possess the qualities necessary for producing things, yet these parts being what he calls minima, and Epicurus iXdxiara, i.e. the least conceivable, have no pro- perties of their own, and therefore cannot exist alone and by themselves, and therefore must have existed in the atom from all eternity, and never can cease to exist in it. This therefore is only a further proof that atoms are solida simplicitate. Be- fore saying more of this passage, I will explain and correct ano- ther, which will illustrate it, but which has itself been mutilated by Lachmann and other editors. I. 746, &c. Lucretius blames Empedocles and others for not admitting that there is a limit to the division of matter, and that there can exist a minimum in things, (in 748, the last word is mutilated; it would per- haps be better to read with the Florentine MS. xxxv. 31 quire, rather than quicquam, though it makes but little difference), "though we see," says Lucretius, "that that is the extreme point of any thing, which is the least that can be perceived by our senses, so that you may infer from this, that because those things which you cannot see (that is to say the atoms, the pri- mordia cceca) have an extreme," (now in the mutilated v. 752, not prorsum is to be supplied, but say in Mis,) "there exists a mini- mum in them likewise." What force there may be in Lucretius'