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 95

There are certain women who conceive with difficulty, but if they do conceive, bring the child to maturity; while others again conceive readily, but are unable to bring the child to birth. Furthermore, some men and some women produce female offspring and some male, as for instance in the story of Hercules, who among all his two and seventy children is said to have begotten but one girl. Those women who are unable to conceive, save with the help of medical treatment or some other adventitious circumstance, are as a general rule apt to bear female children rather than male.

It is a common thing with men to be at first sexually competent and afterwards impotent, and then again to revert to their former powers.

From deformed parents come deformed children, lame from lame and blind from blind, and, speaking generally, children often inherit anything that is peculiar in their parents and are born with similar marks, such as pimples or scars. Such things have been known to be handed down through three generations; for instance, a certain man had a mark on his arm which his son did not possess, but his grandson had it in the same spot though not very distinct.

Such cases, however, are few; for the children of cripples are mostly sound, and there is no hard and fast rule regarding them. While children mostly resemble their parents or their ancestors, it sometimes happens that no such resemblance is to be traced. But parents may pass on resemblance after several generations, as in the case of the woman in Elis, who committed adultery with a negro; in this case it was not the woman's own daughter but the daughter's child that was a blackamoor.

As a rule the daughters have a tendency to take after the mother, and the boys after the father; but sometimes it is the other way, the boys taking after the mother and the girls after the father. And they may resemble both parents in particular features.

There have been known cases of twins that had no resemblance to one another, but they are alike as a general rule. There was once upon a time a woman who had intercourse with her husband a week after giving birth to a child and she conceived and bore a second child as like the first as any twin. Some women have a tendency to produce children that take after themselves, and others children that take after the husband; and this latter case is like that of the celebrated mare in Pharsalus, that got the name of the Honest Wife.

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