Aristotle, Second Part of THE HISTORY OF ANIMALS Complete

Translated by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

II: 128 pages - You are on Page 104

Aquatic in different ways, the differences depending on bodily relation to external temperature and on habit of life, are such animals on the one hand as take in air but live in water, and such on the other hand as take in water and are furnished with gills but go upon dry land and get their living there. At present only one animal of the latter kind is known, the so-called cordylus or water-newt; this creature is furnished not with lungs but with gills, but for all that it is a quadruped and fitted for walking on dry land.

In the case of all these animals their nature appears in some kind of a way to have got warped, just as some male animals get to resemble the female, and some female animals the male. The fact is that animals, if they be subjected to a modification in minute organs, are liable to immense modifications in their general configuration. This phenomenon may be observed in the case of gelded animals: only a minute organ of the animal is mutilated, and the creature passes from the male to the female form. We may infer, then, that if in the primary conformation of the embryo an infinitesimally minute but absolutely essential organ sustain a change of magnitude one way or the other, the animal will in one case turn to male and in the other to female; and also that, if the said organ be obliterated altogether, the animal will be of neither one sex nor the other. And so by the occurrence of modification in minute organs it comes to pass that one animal is terrestrial and another aquatic, in both senses of these terms. And, again, some animals are amphibious whilst other animals are not amphibious, owing to the circumstance that in their conformation while in the embryonic condition there got intermixed into them some portion of the matter of which their subsequent food is constituted; for, as was said above, what is in conformity with nature is to every single animal pleasant and agreeable.

Animals then have been categorized into terrestrial and aquatic in three ways, according to their assumption of air or of water, the temperament of their bodies, or the character of their food; and the mode of life of an animal corresponds to the category in which it is found. That is to say, in some cases the animal depends for its terrestrial or aquatic nature on temperament and diet combined, as well as upon its method of respiration; and sometimes on temperament and habits alone.

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