Page - 1502 - in The Complete Aristotle

with hearing and smell as with sight. For those animals can perceive at a distance which have channels, so to say, running through the parts concerned and projecting far in front of the sense-organs. Therefore all animals whose nostrils are long, as the Laconian hounds, are keen-scented, for the sense- organ being above them, the movements from a distance are not dissipated but go straight to the mark, just as the movements which cause sight do with those who shadow the eyes with the hand. Similar is the case of animals whose ears are long and project far like the eaves of a house, as in some quadrupeds, with the internal spiral passage long; these also catch the movement from afar and pass it on to the sense-organ. In respect of sense-perception at a distance, man is, one may say, the worst of all animals in proportion to his size, but in respect of judging the differences of quality in the objects he is the best of all. The reason is that the sense-organ in man is pure and least earthy and material, and he is by nature the thinnest-skinned of all animals for his size. The workmanship of Nature is admirable also in the seal, for though a viviparous quadruped it has no ears but only passages for hearing. This is because its life is passed in the water; now the ear is a part added to the passages to preserve the movement of the air at a distance; therefore an ear is no use to it but would even bring about the contrary result by receiving a mass of water into itself. We have thus spoken of sight, hearing, and smell. < div id=“section55” class=“section” title=“3”> 3 As for hair, men differ in this themselves at different ages, and also from all other kinds of animals that have hair. These are almost all which are internally viviparous, for even when the covering of such animals is spiny it must be considered as a kind of hair, as in the land hedgehog and any other such animal among the vivipara. Hairs differ in respect of hardness and softness, length and shortness, straightness and curliness, quantity and scantiness, and in addition to these qualities, in their colours, whiteness and blackness and the intermediate shades. They differ also in some of these respects according to age, as they are young or growing old. This is especially plain in man; the hair gets coarser as time goes on, and some go bald on the front of the head; children indeed do not go bald, nor do women, but men do so by the time their age is advancing. Human beings also go grey on the head as they grow 1502