Page - 1472 - in The Complete Aristotle

Some again, persuaded of the truth of a view resembling that of these philosophers, say that if a man copulates with the right or left testis tied up the result is male or female offspring respectively; so at least Leophanes asserted. And some say that the same happens in the case of those who have one or other testis excised, not speaking truth but vaticinating what will happen from probabilities and jumping at the conclusion that it is so before seeing that it proves to be so. Moreover, they know not that these parts of animals contribute nothing to the production of one sex rather than the other; a proof of this is that many animals in which the distinction of sex exists, and which produce both male and female offspring, nevertheless have no testes, as the footless animals; I mean the classes of fish and of serpents. To suppose, then, either that heat and cold are the causes of male and female, or that the different sexes come from the right and left, is not altogether unreasonable in itself; for the right of the body is hotter than the left, and the concocted semen is hotter than the unconcocted; again, the thickened is concocted, and the more thickened is more fertile. Yet to put it in this way is to seek for the cause from too remote a starting-point; we must draw near the immediate causes in so far as it is possible for us. We have, then, previously spoken elsewhere of both the body as a whole and its parts, explaining what each part is and for what reason it exists. But (1) the male and female are distinguished by a certain capacity and incapacity. (For the male is that which can concoct the blood into semen and which can form and secrete and discharge a semen carrying with it the principle of form —by ‘principle’ I do not mean a material principle out of which comes into being an offspring resembling the parent, but I mean the first moving cause, whether it have power to act as such in the thing itself or in something else— but the female is that which receives semen, indeed, but cannot form it for itself or secrete or discharge it.) And (2) all concoction works by means of heat. Therefore the males of animals must needs be hotter than the females. For it is by reason of cold and incapacity that the female is more abundant in blood in certain parts of her anatomy, and this abundance is an evidence of the exact opposite of what some suppose, thinking that the female is hotter than the male for this reason, i.e. the discharge of the catamenia. It is true that blood is hot, and that which has more of it is hotter than that which has less. But they assume that this discharge occurs through excess of blood and of heat, as if it could be taken for granted that all blood is equally blood if only it be liquid and sanguineous in colour, and as if it might not become less in quantity but purer in quality in those who assimilate nourishment properly. In fact they look upon this residual discharge in the same light as that of the intestines, when they think that a greater amount of it is a sign of a hotter nature, whereas the truth is just the opposite. For consider the production of 1472