Seite - 1508 - in The Complete Aristotle

naturally moister than others and as they grow old the moisture in the feathers is too much to decay easily. Greyness comes about by some sort of decay, and is not, as some think, a withering. (1) A proof of the former statement is the fact that hair protected by hats or other coverings goes grey sooner (for the winds prevent decay and the protection keeps off the winds), and the fact that it is aided by anointing with a mixture of oil and water. For, though water cools things, the oil mingled with it prevents the hair from drying quickly, water being easily dried up. (2) That the process is not a withering, that the hair does not whiten as grass does by withering, is shown by the fact that some hairs grow grey from the first, whereas nothing springs up in a withered state. Many hairs also whiten at the tip, for there is least heat in the extremities and thinnest parts. When the hairs of other animals are white, this is caused by nature, not by any affection. The cause of the colours in other animals is the skin; if they are white, the skin is white, if they are dark it is dark, if they are piebald in consequence of a mixture of the hairs, it is found to be white in the one part and dark in the other. But in man the skin is in no way the cause, for even white-skinned men have very dark hair. The reason is that man has the thinnest skin of all animals in proportion to his size and therefore it has not strength to change the hairs; on the contrary the skin itself changes its colour through its weakness and is darkened by sun and wind, while the hairs do not change along with it at all. But in the other animals the skin, owing to its thickness, has the influence belonging to the soil in which a thing grows, therefore the hairs change according to the skin but the skin does not change at all in consequence of the winds and the sun. < div id=“section58” class=“section” title=“6”> 6 Of animals some are uni-coloured (I mean by this term those of which the kind as a whole has one colour, as all lions are tawny; and this condition exists also in birds, fish, and the other classes of animals alike); others though many-coloured are yet whole-coloured (I mean those whose body as a whole has the same colour, as a bull is white as a whole or dark as a whole); others are vari-coloured. This last term is used in both ways; sometimes the whole kind is vari-coloured, as leopards and peacocks, and some fish, e.g. the so- called ‘thrattai’; sometimes the kind as a whole is not so, but such individuals are found in it, as with cattle and goats and, among birds, pigeons; the same applies also to other kinds of birds. The whole-coloured change much more 1508