Page - 1004 - in The Complete Aristotle

externally and internally oviparous present an intermediate arrangement; for the underneath portion of the womb, in which the eggs are, is placed near to the loin, but the part about the orifice is above the gut.) Further, there is the following diversity observable in wombs as compared with one another: namely that the females of horned nonambidental animals are furnished with cotyledons in the womb when they are pregnant, and such is the case, among ambidentals, with the hare, the mouse, and the bat; whereas all other animals that are ambidental, viviparous, and furnished with feet, have the womb quite smooth, and in their case the attachment of the embryo is to the womb itself and not to any cotyledon inside it. The parts, then, in animals that are not homogeneous with themselves and uniform in their texture, both parts external and parts internal, have the properties above assigned to them. < div id=“section36” class=“section” title=“2”> 2 In sanguineous animals the homogeneous or uniform part most universally found is the blood, and its habitat the vein; next in degree of universality, their analogues, lymph and fibre, and, that which chiefly constitutes the frame of animals, flesh and whatsoever in the several parts is analogous to flesh; then bone, and parts that are analogous to bone, as fish-bone and gristle; and then, again, skin, membrane, sinew, hair, nails, and whatever corresponds to these; and, furthermore, fat, suet, and the excretions: and the excretions are dung, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Now, as the nature of blood and the nature of the veins have all the appearance of being primitive, we must discuss their properties first of all, and all the more as some previous writers have treated them very unsatisfactorily. And the cause of the ignorance thus manifested is the extreme difficulty experienced in the way of observation. For in the dead bodies of animals the nature of the chief veins is undiscoverable, owing to the fact that they collapse at once when the blood leaves them; for the blood pours out of them in a stream, like liquid out of a vessel, since there is no blood separately situated by itself, except a little in the heart, but it is all lodged in the veins. In living animals it is impossible to inspect these parts, for of their very nature they are situated inside the body and out of sight. For this reason anatomists who have carried on their investigations on dead bodies in the dissecting room have failed to discover the chief roots of the veins, 1004