Seite - 906 - in The Complete Aristotle

volume, on its return downwards it distends the veins, and forcibly compresses the passage through which respiration is effected. This explains why wines are not good for infants or for wet nurses (for it makes no difference, doubtless, whether the infants themselves, or their nurses, drink them), but such persons should drink them [if at all] diluted with water and in small quantity. For wine is spirituous, and of all wines the dark more so than any other. The upper parts, in infants, are so filled with nutriment that within five months [after birth] they do not even turn the neck [sc. to raise the head]; for in them, as in persons deeply intoxicated, there is ever a large quantity of moisture ascending. It is reasonable, too, to think that this affection is the cause of the embryo’s remaining at rest in the womb at first. Also, as a general rule, persons whose veins are inconspicuous, as well as those who are dwarf-like, or have abnormally large heads, are addicted to sleep. For in the former the veins are narrow, so that it is not easy for the moisture to flow down through them; while in the case of dwarfs and those whose heads are abnormally large, the impetus of the evaporation upwards is excessive. Those [on the contrary] whose veins are large are, thanks to the easy flow through the veins, not addicted to sleep, unless, indeed, they labour under some other affection which counteracts [this easy flow]. Nor are the ‘atrabilious’ addicted to sleep, for in them the inward region is cooled so that the quantity of evaporation in their case is not great. For this reason they have large appetites, though spare and lean; for their bodily condition is as if they derived no benefit from what they eat. The dark bile, too, being itself naturally cold, cools also the nutrient tract, and the other parts wheresoever such secretion is potentially present [i.e. tends to be formed]. Hence it is plain from what has been said that sleep is a sort of concentration, or natural recoil, of the hot matter inwards [towards its centre], due to the cause above mentioned. Hence restless movement is a marked feature in the case of a person when drowsy. But where it [the heat in the upper and outer parts] begins to fail, he grows cool, and owing to this cooling process his eye-lids droop. Accordingly [in sleep] the upper and outward parts are cool, but the inward and lower, i.e. the parts at the feet and in the interior of the body, are hot. Yet one might found a difficulty on the facts that sleep is most oppressive in its onset after meals, and that wine, and other such things, though they possess heating properties, are productive of sleep, for it is not probable that sleep should be a process of cooling while the things that cause sleeping are themselves hot. Is the explanation of this, then, to be found in the fact that, as the stomach when empty is hot, while replenishment cools it by the movement it occasions, so the passages and tracts in the head are cooled as the ‘evaporation’ ascends thither? Or, as those who have hot water poured on 906