Aristotle ON THE PARTS OF ANIMALS Complete

Translated by W. Ogle.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

144 pages - You are on Page 76

Part 6

The lung, then, is an organ found in all the animals of a certain class, because they live on land. For there must of necessity be some means or other of tempering the heat of the body; and in sanguineous animals, as they are of an especially hot nature, the cooling agency must be external, whereas in the bloodless kinds the innate spirit is sufficient of itself for the purpose. The external cooling agent must be either air or water. In fishes the agent is water. Fishes therefore never have a lung, but have gills in its place, as was stated in the treatise on Respiration. But animals that breathe are cooled by air. These therefore are all provided with a lung.

All land animals breathe, and even some water animals, such as the whale, the dolphin, and all the spouting Cetacea. For many animals lie half-way between terrestrial and aquatic; some that are terrestrial and that inspire air being nevertheless of such a bodily constitution that they abide for the most time in the water; and some that are aquatic partaking so largely of the land character, that respiration constitutes for them the man condition of life.

The organ of respiration is the lung. This derives its motion from the heart; but it is its own large size and spongy texture that affords amplitude of space for entrance of the breath. For when the lung rises up the breath streams in, and is again expelled when the lung collapses. It has been said that the lung exists as a provision to meet the jumping of the heart. But this is out of the question. For man is practically the only animal whose heart presents this phenomenon of jumping, inasmuch as he alone is influenced by hope and anticipation of the future. Moreover, in most animals the lung is separated from the heart by a considerable interval and lies above it, so that it can contribute nothing to mitigate any jumping.

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