  Recognising the need to avoid problems perceived to be associated with infinite divisibility was a point shared by proponents of natural minima and mechanical atomists. But this one point of contact must not blind us to the crucial differences between the two traditions. Mechanical atoms were proposed as components of matter in general. They were unchangeable and possessed a minimum of properties, shape, size and a degree of motion or rest together with the impenetrability of their component matter. The motivation for ascribing just those properties to atoms was to provide an intelligible account of being and change in general. By contrast, natural minima possess properties characteristic of the substances of which they are the minima. The minima are not unchangeable because they are transformed into more complicated minima via chemical combination. The minima were not basic building blocks for the scholastics that developed this theory because their properties needed to be traced back to their composition from the four Aristotelian elements. Finally, the minima theory was developed as an attempt to accommodate chemical change. It was not intended as a theory of everything in the way that mechanical atomism was.