Aristotle ON YOUTH AND OLD AGE, ON LIFE AND DEATH, ON BREATHING Complete

Translated by G. Ross.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

28 pages - You are on Page 22

The question, however, as to what sorts of animals should be called warm and what cold, has in each special case received consideration. Though in one respect there is reason in the explanation which Empedocles aims at establishing, yet his account is not correct. Excess in a bodily state is cured by a situation or season of opposite character, but the constitution is best maintained by an environment akin to it. There is a difference between the material of which any animal is constituted and the states and dispositions of that material. For example, if nature were to constitute a thing of wax or of ice, she would not preserve it by putting it in a hot place, for the opposing quality would quickly destroy it, seeing that heat dissolves that which cold congeals. Again, a thing composed of salt or nitre would not be taken and placed in water, for fluid dissolves that of which the consistency is due to the hot and the dry.

Hence if the fluid and the dry supply the material for all bodies, it is reasonable that things the composition of which is due to the fluid and the cold should have liquid for their medium [and, if they are cold, they will exist in the cold], while that which is due to the dry will be found in the dry. Thus trees grow not in water but on dry land. But the same theory would relegate them to the water, on account of their excess of dryness, just as it does the things that are excessively fiery. They would migrate thither not on account of its cold but owing to its fluidity.

Thus the natural character of the material of objects is of the same nature as the region in which they exist; the liquid is found in liquid, the dry on land, the warm in air. With regard, however, to states of body, a cold situation has, on the other hand, a beneficial effect on excess of heat, and a warm environment on excess of cold, for the region reduces to a mean the excess in the bodily condition. The regions appropriate to each material and the revolutions of the seasons which all experience supply the means which must be sought in order to correct such excesses; but, while states of the body can be opposed in character to the environment, the material of which it is composed can never be so. This, then, is a sufficient explanation of why it is not owing to the heat in their constitution that some animals are aquatic, others terrestrial, as Empedocles maintains, and of why some possess lungs and others do not.

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