  Whilst Aristotle and the scholastics can be given the credit for pinpointing a fundamental problem associated with chemical change they can hardly be credited with providing a definitive solution. It should be recognised that adding the assumption of natural minima does not contribute in any way to a solution to the problem posed by chemical change. The problem of understanding how components persist in compounds simply becomes transferred to the problem of how minima of components persist in minima of compounds. So the extent to which acceptance of natural minima became widespread cannot be explained in terms of their contribution to a solution to the fundamental problem of chemical change. There were a number of motivations for assuming minima, all having at least their germs in Aristotle. One idea was that a portion of a substance can resist the corrupting influence of the surrounding medium only if there is a sufficient amount of it. Another stemmed from the common recognition that substances must come into contact if they are to combine. The particulate nature of substances facilitates such contact, as Aristotle hinted (On Generation and Corruption, 1, 10, 328a, 34). A third motivation concerned the logical problems, dating back to Zeno, that were understood to flow from assuming infinite divisibility.