第66章

Besides, it is absurd to suppose that these parts should come into being as something isolated, without the body as a whole having changed along with them.Take first and foremost the blood-vessels, round which the whole mass of the flesh lies as round a framework.

It is not reasonable that these should become of a certain quality because of the uterus, but rather that the uterus should do so on account of them.For though it is true that each is a receptacle of blood of some kind, still the system of the vessels is prior to the other; the moving principle must needs always be prior to that which it moves, and it is because it is itself of a certain quality that it is the cause of the development.The difference, then, of these parts as compared with each other in the two sexes is only a concomitant result; not this but something else must be held to be the first principle and the cause of the development of an embryo as male or female; this is so even if no semen is secreted by either male or female, but the embryo is formed in any way you please.

The same argument as that with which we meet Empedocles and Democritus will serve against those who say that the male comes from the right and the female from the left.If the male contributes no material to the embryo, there can be nothing in this view.If, as they say, he does contribute something of the sort, we must confront them in the same way as we did the theory of Empedocles, which accounts for the difference between male and female by the heat and cold of the uterus.They make the same mistake as he does, when they account for the difference by their 'right and left', though they see that the sexes differ actually by the whole of the sexual parts; for what reason then is the body of the uterus to exist in those embryos which come from the left and not in those from the right? For if an embryo have come from the left but has not acquired this part, it will be a female without a uterus, and so too there is nothing to stop another from being a male with a uterus! Besides as has been said before, a female embryo has been observed in the right part of the uterus, a male in the left, or again both at once in the same part, and this not only once but several times.

Some again, persuaded of the truth of a view resembling that of these philosophers, say that if a man copulates with the right or left testis tied up the result is male or female offspring respectively; so at least Leophanes asserted.And some say that the same happens in the case of those who have one or other testis excised, not speaking truth but vaticinating what will happen from probabilities and jumping at the conclusion that it is so before seeing that it proves to be so.

Moreover, they know not that these parts of animals contribute nothing to the production of one sex rather than the other; a proof of this is that many animals in which the distinction of sex exists, and which produce both male and female offspring, nevertheless have no testes, as the footless animals; I mean the classes of fish and of serpents.

To suppose, then, either that heat and cold are the causes of male and female, or that the different sexes come from the right and left, is not altogether unreasonable in itself; for the right of the body is hotter than the left, and the concocted semen is hotter than the unconcocted; again, the thickened is concocted, and the more thickened is more fertile.Yet to put it in this way is to seek for the cause from too remote a starting-point; we must draw near the immediate causes in so far as it is possible for us.