Page - 1026 - in The Complete Aristotle

suckle an infant. The people that live on and about Mount Oeta take such she-goats as decline the male and rub their udders hard with nettles to cause an irritation amounting to pain; hereupon they milk the animals, procuring at first a liquid resembling blood, then a liquid mixed with purulent matter, and eventually milk, as freely as from females submitting to the male. As a general rule, milk is not found in the male of man or of any other animal, though from time to time it has been found in a male; for instance, once in Lemnos a he-goat was milked by its dugs (for it has, by the way, two dugs close to the penis), and was milked to such effect that cheese was made of the produce, and the same phenomenon was repeated in a male of its own begetting. Such occurrences, however, are regarded as supernatural and fraught with omen as to futurity, and in point of fact when the Lemnian owner of the animal inquired of the oracle, the god informed him that the portent foreshadowed the acquisition of a fortune. With some men, after puberty, milk can be produced by squeezing the breasts; cases have been known where on their being subjected to a prolonged milking process a considerable quantity of milk has been educed. In milk there is a fatty element, which in clotted milk gets to resemble oil. Goat’s milk is mixed with sheep’s milk in Sicily, and wherever sheep’s milk is abundant. The best milk for clotting is not only that where the cheese is most abundant, but that also where the cheese is driest. Now some animals produce not only enough milk to rear their young, but a superfluous amount for general use, for cheese-making and for storage. This is especially the case with the sheep and the goat, and next in degree with the cow. Mare’s milk, by the way, and milk of the she-ass are mixed in with Phrygian cheese. And there is more cheese in cow’s milk than in goat’s milk; for graziers tell us that from nine gallons of goat’s milk they can get nineteen cheeses at an obol apiece, and from the same amount of cow’s milk, thirty. Other animals give only enough of milk to rear their young withal, and no superfluous amount and none fitted for cheese-making, as is the case with all animals that have more than two breasts or dugs; for with none of such animals is milk produced in superabundance or used for the manufacture of cheese. The juice of the fig and rennet are employed to curdle milk. The fig-juice is first squeezed out into wool; the wool is then washed and rinsed, and the rinsing put into a little milk, and if this be mixed with other milk it curdles Rennet is a kind of milk, for it is found in the stomach of the animal while it is yet suckling. 1026