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On the face of it, one’s comment on this view would be that these are so many kinds of prognostications and not of lightning. Of the latter the kinds are the boring, the splitting, and the scorching. The first has a subtle flame, which from its unalloyed purity can win escape through the tiniest aperture. The second, which scatters to the winds what it strikes, is massed fire with an admixture of condensed tempestuous wind. So the first kind escapes again by the opening by which it entered. The second spreads wide the effects of its violence, it bursts what it strikes, and does not perforate it. The third kind mentioned, the scorching, has much earthiness in its composition, and contains fire rather than flame. It therefore leaves deep scars of fire, which will be branded in what it has struck. No lightning, it is true, that comes to earth is fireless, but this kind is distinctively called fiery, because it imprints the marks of fire so manifestly, by either scorching or staining. It scorches in three different ways, that is, it either breathes on its object, so to speak, inflicting slight injury, or burns it right up, or sets it on fire. All those are methods of what I have called scorching, differing, however, in character and degree. Whatever is, for example, burnt up is necessarily scorched as well. But [the converse is not equally true], everything that is scorched is not necessarily burnt up. And so with what is set on fire; it is not necessarily consumed, the fire may merely have scorched it in passing. Everybody knows that things may be scorched without breaking out into fire, but that nothing can break out into fire without being scorched. I have only one further remark on the point: an object may be consumed without being set on fire; it may also be set on fire without being consumed.