Page - 1081 - in The Complete Aristotle

sets them in motion, when they fly away. With all grubs and all animals that break out from the grub state, generation is due primarily to the heat of the sun or to wind. Ascarids are more likely to be found, and grow with unusual rapidity, in places where there is a deposit of a mixed and heterogeneous kind, as in kitchens and in ploughed fields, for the contents of such places are disposed to rapid putrefaction. In autumn, also, owing to the drying up of moisture, they grow in unusual numbers. The tick is generated from couch-grass. The cockchafer comes from a grub that is generated in the dung of the cow or the ass. The cantharus or scarabeus rolls a piece of dung into a ball, lies hidden within it during the winter, and gives birth therein to small grubs, from which grubs come new canthari. Certain winged insects also come from the grubs that are found in pulse, in the same fashion as in the cases described. Flies grow from grubs in the dung that farmers have gathered up into heaps: for those who are engaged in this work assiduously gather up the compost, and this they technically term ‘working-up’ the manure. The grub is exceedingly minute to begin with; first even at this stage-it assumes a reddish colour, and then from a quiescent state it takes on the power of motion, as though born to it; it then becomes a small motionless grub; it then moves again, and again relapses into immobility; it then comes out a perfect fly, and moves away under the influence of the sun’s heat or of a puff of air. The myops or horse-fly is engendered in timber. The orsodacna or budbane is a transformed grub; and this grub is engendered in cabbage-stalks. The cantharis comes from the caterpillars that are found on fig-trees or pear-trees or fir-trees—for on all these grubs are engendered-and also from caterpillars found on the dog-rose; and the cantharis takes eagerly to ill-scented substances, from the fact of its having been engendered in ill-scented woods. The conops comes from a grub that is engendered in the slime of vinegar. And, by the way, living animals are found in substances that are usually supposed to be incapable of putrefaction; for instance, worms are found in long-lying snow; and snow of this description gets reddish in colour, and the grub that is engendered in it is red, as might have been expected, and it is also hairy. The grubs found in the snows of Media are large and white; and all such grubs are little disposed to motion. In Cyprus, in places where copper- ore is smelted, with heaps of the ore piled on day after day, an animal is engendered in the fire, somewhat larger than a blue bottle fly, furnished with wings, which can hop or crawl through the fire. And the grubs and these latter animals perish when you keep the one away from the fire and the other from the snow. Now the salamander is a clear case in point, to show us that animals 1081