Page - 1479 - in The Complete Aristotle

should be concocted and formed into distinct parts is too cold and in too great quantity. Thus the moving agent, mastering it in one part but not in another, makes the embryo in formation to be multiform, as happens with athletes because they eat so much. For owing to the quantity of their food their nature is not able to master it all, so as to increase and arrange their form symmetrically; therefore their limbs develop irregularly, sometimes indeed almost so much that no one of them resembles what it was before. Similar to this is also the disease known as satyrism, in which the face appears like that of a satyr owing to a quantity of unconcocted humour or wind being diverted into parts of the face. We have thus discussed the cause of all these phenomena, (1) female and male offspring are produced, (2) why some are similar to their parents, female to female and male to male, and others the other way about, females being similar to the father and males to the mother, and in general why some are like their ancestors while others are like none of them, and all this as concerns both the body as a whole and each of the parts separately. Different accounts, however, have been given of these phenomena by some of the nature- philosophers; I mean why children are like or unlike their parents. They give two versions of the reason. Some say that the child is more like that parent of the two from whom comes more semen, this applying equally both to the body as a whole and to the separate parts, on the assumption that semen comes from each part of both parents; if an equal part comes from each, then, they say, the child is like neither. But if this is false, if semen does not come off from the whole body of the parents, it is clear that the reason assigned cannot be the cause of likeness and unlikeness. Moreover, they are hard put to it to explain how it is that a female child can be like the father and a male like the mother. For (1) those who assign the same cause of sex as Empedocles or Democritus say what is on other grounds impossible, and (2) those who say that it is determined by the greater or smaller amount of semen coming the male or female parent, and that this is why one child is male and another female, cannot show how the female is to resemble the father and the male the mother, for it is impossible that more should come from both at once. Again, for what reason is a child generally like its ancestors, even the more remote? None of the semen has come from them at any rate. But those who account for the similarity in the manner which remains to be discussed, explain this point better, as well as the others. For there are some who say that the semen, though one, is as it were a common mixture (panspermia) of many elements; just as, if one should mix many juices in one liquid and then take some from it, it would be possible to take, not an equal quantity always from each juice, but sometimes more of one and sometimes more of another, sometimes some of one and none at all of another, so they 1479