Page - 1148 - in The Complete Aristotle

it put forth its head while the rest of the body remains within. In cases where flooding takes place rather before its time, it is apt to be followed by difficult parturition. But if discharge take place after birth in small quantity, and in cases where it only takes place at the beginning and does not continue till the fortieth day, then in such cases women make a better recovery and are the sooner ready to conceive again. Until the child is forty days old it neither laughs nor weeps during waking hours, but of nights it sometimes does both; and for the most part it does not even notice being tickled, but passes most of its time in sleep. As it keeps on growing, it gets more and more wakeful; and moreover it shows signs of dreaming, though it is long afterwards before it remembers what it dreams. In other animals there is no contrasting difference between one bone and another, but all are properly formed; but in children the front part of the head is soft and late of ossifying. And by the way, some animals are born with teeth, but children begin to cut their teeth in the seventh month; and the front teeth are the first to come through, sometimes the upper and sometimes the lower ones. And the warmer the nurses’ milk so much the quicker are the children’s teeth to come. < div id=“section149” class=“section” title=“11”> 11 After parturition and the cleasing flood the milk comes in plenty, and in some women it flows not only from the nipples but at divers parts of the breasts, and in some cases even from the armpits. And for some time afterwards there continue to be certain indurated parts of the breast called strangalides, or ‘knots’, which occur when it so happens that the moisture is not concocted, or when it finds no outlet but accumulates within. For the whole breast is so spongy that if a woman in drinking happen to swallow a hair, she gets a pain in her breast, which ailment is called ‘trichia’; and the pain lasts till the hair either find its own way out or be sucked out with the milk. Women continue to have milk until their next conception; and then the milk stops coming and goes dry, alike in the human species and in the quadrupedal vivipara. So long as there is a flow of milk the menstrual purgations do not take place, at least as a general rule, though the discharge has been known to occur during the period of suckling. For, speaking generally, a determination of moisture does not take place at one and the same time in several directions; as for instance the menstrual purgations tend to be 1148