Aristotle, Third Part of THE HISTORY OF ANIMALS Complete

Translated by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.

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III: 59 pages - You are on Page 7

Part 28

Variety in animal life may be produced by variety of locality: thus in one place an animal will not be found at all, in another it will be small, or short-lived, or will not thrive. Sometimes this sort of difference is observed in closely adjacent districts. Thus, in the territory of Miletus, in one district cicadas are found while there are none in the district close adjoining; and in Cephalenia there is a river on one side of which the cicada is found and not on the other. In Pordoselene there is a public road one side of which the weasel is found but not on the other. In Boeotia the mole is found in great abundance in the neighbourhood of Orchomenus, but there are none in Lebadia though it is in the immediate vicinity, and if a mole be transported from the one district to the other it will refuse to burrow in the soil. The hare cannot live in Ithaca if introduced there; in fact it will be found dead, turned towards the point of the beach where it was landed. The horseman-ant is not found in Sicily; the croaking frog has only recently appeared in the neighbourhood of Cyrene. In the whole of Libya there is neither wild boar, nor stag, nor wild goat; and in India, according to Ctesias-no very good authority, by the way-there are no swine, wild or tame, but animals that are devoid of blood and such as go into hiding or go torpid are all of immense size there. In the Euxine there are no small molluscs nor testaceans, except a few here and there; but in the Red Sea all the testaceans are exceedingly large. In Syria the sheep have tails a cubit in breadth; the goats have ears a span and a palm long, and some have ears that flap down to the ground; and the cattle have humps on their shoulders, like the camel. In Lycia goats are shorn for their fleece, just as sheep are in all other countries. In Libya the long-horned ram is born with horns, and not the ram only, as Homer' words it, but the ewe as well; in Pontus, on the confines of Scythia, the ram is without horns.

In Egypt animals, as a rule, are larger than their congeners in Greece, as the cow and the sheep; but some are less, as the dog, the wolf, the hare, the fox, the raven, and the hawk; others are of pretty much the same size, as the crow and the goat. The difference, where it exists, is attributed to the food, as being abundant in one case and insufficient in another, for instance for the wolf and the hawk; for provision is scanty for the carnivorous animals, small birds being scarce; food is scanty also for the hare and for all frugivorous animals, because neither the nuts nor the fruit last long.

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