Over the centuries there have been many famous books on meteorology, but the very earliest of the genre was probably the treatise written around 334 BC by Aristotle.
Like his contemporaries, Aristotle believed creation to be composed of four basic elements: earth, water, air and fire. These were neatly arranged to form four concentric spheres, with earth in the middle, surrounded by water, and both in turn lying within a vast envelope of air. The fourth element, fire, occupied the outermost fringes of the world.
This division between the elements was not rigid: earth, for instance, obviously projected above the water here and there, and fire was often seen to descend to earth in the form of lightning. These elements, naturally enough, were known to the Greeks by their Greek names: "air" was meteoros, meaning "high" or "lofty", and hence what was happening in the air was "meteorology".
Aristotle's four-volume treatise was appropriately entitled Meteorologica. The book summarised the knowledge then extant, becoming the standard work of reference on such matters for nearly 1,600 years, and some of its theories are fairly near the mark.
"The region which lies second beneath the celestial, and first above the earth," he says, "is the joint province of water and of air, and of the various phenomena that accompany the formation of water above the earth. The controlling and first cause of these phenomena is the circle of the sun's revolution, for it is evident that as it approaches or recedes, the sun produces dissolution and composition, and is thus the cause of generation and destruction.
"The earth is at rest, and the moisture about it is evaporated by the sun's rays and rises upwards. But when the heat which causes it to rise has left it, some being dispersed into the upper region, and some being quenched by rising too high above the earth, the vapour cools and condenses, turns from air into water, and falls to earth again.
"The formation of water from air produces cloud, while mist is the residue of the condensation of air into water and is therefore a sign of fine weather rather than of rain; mist is, as it were, unproductive cloud.
"Moisture, then, is always made to rise by heat and to fall again to the earth by cold, and there are appropriate names for these processes and for those proceeding from them. When water falls in small drops, for example, it is called `drizzle', and when in larger drops `rain'."
Not bad, is it, for an explanation provided 2,300 years ago?