Seite - 1444 - in The Complete Aristotle

On the Generation of Animals, Book III Translated by Arthur Platt < div id=“book3” class=“book” title=“Book III”> 1 We have now spoken about the sterility of mules, and about those animals which are viviparous both externally and within themselves. The generation of the oviparous sanguinea is to a certain extent similar to that of the animals that walk, and all may be embraced in the same general statement; but in other respects there are differences in them both as compared with each other and with those that walk. All alike are generated from sexual union, the male emitting semen into the female. But among the ovipara (1) birds produce a perfect hard-shelled egg, unless it be injured by disease, and the eggs of birds are all two-coloured. (2) The cartilaginous fishes, as has been often said already, are oviparous internally but produce the young alive, the egg changing previously from one part of the uterus to another; and their egg is soft-shelled and of one colour. One of this class alone does not produce the young from the egg within itself, the so-called ‘frog’; the reason of which must be stated later. (3) All other oviparous fishes produce an egg of one colour, but this is imperfect, for its growth is completed outside the mother’s body by the same cause as are those eggs which are perfected within. Concerning the uterus of these classes of animals, what differences there are among them and for what reasons, has been stated previously. For in some of the viviparous creatures it is high up near the hypozoma, in others low down by the pudenda; the former in the cartilaginous fishes, the latter in animals both internally and externally viviparous, such as man and horse and the rest; in the ovipara it is sometimes low, as in the oviparous fish, and sometimes high, as in birds. Some embryos are formed in birds spontaneously, which are called wind- eggs and ‘zephyria’ by some; these occur in birds which are not given to flight nor rapine but which produce many young, for these birds have much residual matter, whereas in the birds of prey all such secretion is diverted to the wings and wing-feathers, while the body is small and dry and hot. (The secretion corresponding in hen-birds to catamenia, and the semen of the cock, are residues.) Since then both the wings and the semen are made from 1444