Aristotle ON THE PARTS OF ANIMALS Complete

Translated by W. Ogle.

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144 pages - You are on Page 87

It is said also that when men in battle are wounded anywhere near the midriff, they are seen to laugh, owing to the heat produced by the wound. This may possibly be the case. At any rate it is a statement made by much more credible persons than those who tell the story of the human head, how it speaks after it is cut off. For so some assert, and even call in Homer to support them, representing him as alluding to this when he wrote, 'His head still speaking rolled into the dust,' instead of 'The head of the speaker'. So fully was the possibility of such an occurrence accepted in Caria, that one of that country was actually brought to trial under the following circumstances. The priest of Zeus Hoplosmios had been murdered; but as yet it had not been ascertained who was the assassin; when certain persons asserted that they had heard the murdered man's head, which had been severed from the body, repeat several times the words, 'Cercidas slew man on mam.' Search was thereupon made and a man of those parts who bore the name of Cercidas hunted out and put upon his trial. But it is impossible that any one should utter a word when the windpipe is severed and no motion any longer derived from the lung. Moreover, among the Barbarians, where heads are chopped off with great rapidity, nothing of the kind has ever yet occurred. Why, again, does not the like occur in the case of other animals than man? For that none of them should laugh, when their midriff is wounded, is but what one would expect; for no animal but man ever laughs. So, too, there is nothing irrational in supposing that the trunk may run forwards to a certain distance after the head has been cut seeing that bloodless animals at any rate can live, and that for a considerable time, after decapitation, as has been set forth and explained in other passages.

The purposes, then, for which the viscera severally exist have now been stated. It is of necessity upon the inner terminations of the vessels that they are developed; for humour, and that of a bloody character, cannot but exude at these points, and it is of this, solidified and coagulated, that the substance of the viscera is formed. Thus they are of a bloody character, and in substance resemble each other while they differ from other parts.

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