Aristotle's Meteorologica has little endeared itself to modern scholars. H.D.P. Lee, in the preface to his translation (still the most recent into English), bemoaned the ‘intrinsic lack of interest of its contents’ (1952, p. xxv). V. Coutant, to take another case, dismissed it as an ‘uninspired set of lecture notes’ likely to arouse ‘only contempt’ in readers (CW 46 [1953], 154). With ‘champions’ like these, scholarly attention to all but the fourth and final book, which W. sets aside as disconnected from the Meteorologica proper (pp. 8–9, 35 n. 2), had largely atrophied. Indeed, the volume under review is the first full-length study devoted to the work to appear in over 150 years. W.'s invigorating treatment shows that sustained attention to the Meteorologica is not only long overdue but also immensely rewarding. It ought to revive the field.

W. divides his study into two principal parts. The first section, ‘Methodology and Structure’ (Chapters 1–5), situates the Meteorologica both against the background of early Greek physical theories and within Aristotle's own corpus. Throughout, W.'s ‘primary interest is the way in which Aristotle's method contributes to the unity of the science of meteorology’ (p. 8). As he shows, Aristotle is ultimately concerned to establish meteorology as a semi-autonomous science capable of bridging the gulf between general physics and biology.

According to W., Aristotle took himself to have inherited a moribund science, starved for sustenance by those who, in Parmenides' wake, had attempted to reduce ‘all natural phenomena to general material principles’ and, in so doing, reframed meteorology as merely ‘another trivial application of general physics’ (p. 24). Aristotle resists that tradition by introducing two principles that are specific to the science–namely, the smoky and vaporous exhalations that help steady the basic cosmic structure presented in De caelo and serve as proximate material causes to most meteorological phenomena. The exhalations are well integrated with the principles of general physics, especially the simple bodies; the smoky exhalation, for example, is ‘hot and dry’ and ‘potentially like fire’ (Mete. 1.3.340b28–9). Yet, the exhalations are not specific forms of, and so not reducible to, those simple bodies, for they lack the ability to transform into one another. Since Aristotle's meteorological principles are thus adapted from but irreducible to those of general physics, W. claims, ‘the Meteorologica provides a model, hitherto unappreciated, of an integral genus or subject matter’ (p. 278).

While Aristotle's choice of principles ties the Meteorologica to the Physics, De caelo and De generatione, a study of Aristotle's method reveals closer affinities to the biological works. W. argues that Aristotle classifies meteorological phenomena not by dichotomous division, but rather by the ‘“greatest group” system of multiple differentiae’ most familiar from the Parts of Animals (p. 73). In particular, Aristotle takes meteorological phenomena to fall into fundamentally distinct classes ‘defined by several mutually unsubordinated generic differentiae’, viz. their material causes, efficient causes and places, within which members are distinguished by degree rather than kind (p. 76). Torches and shooting stars, for example, are both combustions of the dry exhalation, and so members of the same greatest group, but differ, in part, in the relative quantities of their material. This network of causal differentiae structures the entire range of meteorological phenomena. As W. puts it, ‘because of the hierarchical order among the causal differentiae, where one material [smoky exhalation], one place [higher], one efficient cause [direct locomotion of the heavens] is superior to another, Aristotle is able to produce a set of hierarchies among the phenomena that unifies them as a group and prefigures the scala naturae among the living beings of the biological works’ (p. 279).

One might wonder how far such analogies to Aristotelian biology extend. Teleological reasoning is here a conspicuous boundary. Despite grounds for expectations to the contrary (e.g. the rainfall example in Physics 2.8), W. argues that teleology plays no explanatory role in Aristotle's treatment of the meteora. His discussion of Aristotelian teleology (pp. 93–104) is well worth attending to, but what really matters, for W.'s purposes, are the reasons why Aristotle should so consistently avoid teleological explanations in the Meteorologica. W. suggests that their absence allows Aristotle to view meteorological phenomena from two competing perspectives without forcing him to choose between them. On the one hand, Aristotle regards the meteora as akin to a functional unity, ‘as if they were the body of the cosmos’, moved mechanically by the heavens ‘just as the heart moves the limbs’. On the other hand, Aristotle regards each ‘meteorological phenomenon … as a sort of proto-animal, each independent of all others’. As a consequence, Aristotle ‘is better able to stabilize the sublunary world between its role in cosmic unity and its role in prefiguring terrestrial diversity without having it definitively serve the purposes of either’ (p. 13). If W. is correct, then the Meteorologica occupies a pivotal position among the physical works, transitioning from the study of cosmic to biological nature.

The second section of the book, ‘The meteora’ (Chapters 6–13), illuminates Aristotle's treatments of the various kinds of meteorological phenomena roughly in the order of his own presentation. W.'s discussion never becomes myopically focused on individual passages, however. In part, this is due to his decision to concentrate in each chapter ‘on one or two problems that have been neglected or unsolved’ rather than provide a running commentary (p. 7). This approach suits the material well. Where we can identify the phenomena under discussion, Aristotle's accounts are, almost without exception, grossly mistaken. W.'s strategy saves him from trying to salvage or redeem Aristotle's more tortured arguments and allows him instead to emphasise the theoretical pressures that repeatedly incline Aristotle towards the wrong conclusions. Since those pressures, on W.'s reading, revolve around making space for meteorology as a semi-autonomous science intermediary between general physics and biology, this second section serves further to develop and more concretely exemplify the major claims of the first. Specialists will of course find much to excite them in W.'s meticulously argued interpretations, but the generalist reader is not left behind. Along the way, W. treats readers to insightful discussions of Aristotle's handling of the definition and essence of one of a kind particulars (in Chapter 6), contemporary geography and Aristotle's model of climate change (in Chapters 8 and 10), Aristotle's selective use of empirical evidence in dialectic (in Chapter 9), ancient visual ray theories of perception, the coordination and subordination of Aristotelian sciences, and views about the nature of geometrical proof (in Chapter 12).

This is a rich and well-produced volume (the diagram of Aristotle's meteora on p. 74 is especially lovely). While few will agree with all of W.'s conclusions, even fewer, I suspect, will look at the Meteorologica in the same way after considering them.