Page - 1403 - in The Complete Aristotle

whole animal undifferentiated, and what each of them is actually such is the semen potentially, either in virtue of its own mass or because it has a certain power in itself. I mention these alternatives here because we have not yet made it clear from the distinctions drawn hitherto whether it is the matter of the semen that is the cause of generation, or whether it has in it some faculty and efficient cause thereof, for the hand also or any other bodily part is not hand or other part in a true sense if it be without soul or some other power, but is only called by the same name as the living hand. On this subject, then, so much may be laid down. But since it is necessary (1) that the weaker animal also should have a secretion greater in quantity and less concocted, and (2) that being of such a nature it should be a mass of sanguineous liquid, and (3) since that which Nature endows with a smaller portion of heat is weaker, and (4) since it has already been stated that such is the character of the female—putting all these considerations together we see that the sanguineous matter discharged by the female is also a secretion. And such is the discharge of the so-called catamenia. It is plain, then, that the catamenia are a secretion, and that they are analogous in females to the semen in males. The circumstances connected with them are evidence that this view is correct. For the semen begins to appear in males and to be emitted at the same time of life that the catamenia begin to flow in females, and that they change their voice and their breasts begin to develop. So, too, in the decline of life the generative power fails in the one sex and the catamenia in the other. The following signs also indicate that this discharge in females is a secretion. Generally speaking women suffer neither from haemorrhoids nor bleeding at the nose nor anything else of the sort except when the catamenia are ceasing, and if anything of the kind occurs the flow is interfered with because the discharge is diverted to it. Further, the blood-vessels of women stand out less than those of men, and women are rounder and smoother because the secretion which in men goes to these vessels is drained away with the catamenia. We must suppose, too, that the same cause accounts for the fact that the bulk of the body is smaller in females than in males among the vivipara, since this is the only class in which the catamenia are discharged from the body. And in this class the fact is clearest in women, for the discharge is greater in women than in the other animals. Wherefore her pallor and the absence of prominent blood-vessels is most conspicuous, and the deficient development of her body compared with a man’s is obvious. Now since this is what corresponds in the female to the semen in the male, and since it is not possible that two such discharges should be found together, 1403