SPRING QUARTER, 2006
Department of History
University of California, Irvine
Instructor: Dr. Barbara J. Becker
Week 1. Soul excerpts from
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1. Reproduction of animals.
As to the parts internal and external that all animals are furnished withal, and further as to the senses, to voice, and sleep, and the duality sex, all these topics have now been touched upon. It now remains for us to discuss ... their several modes of propagation.
These modes are many and diverse, and in some respects are like, and in other respects are unlike to one another.... We shall commence, then, with testaceans [snails, e.g.], and then proceed to crustaceans [crayfish, e.g.], and then ... molluscs, and insects, then fishes viviparous [live-bearing] and fishes oviparous [egg-bearing], and next birds; and afterwards we shall treat of animals provided with feet, both such as are oviparous and such as are viviparous, and we may observe that some quadrupeds are viviparous, but that the only viviparous biped is man.
Now there is one property that animals are found to have in common with plants. For some plants are generated from the seed of plants, whilst other plants are self-generated through the formation of some elemental principle similar to a seed; and of these latter plants some derive their nutriment from the ground, whilst others grow inside other plants.... So with animals, some spring from parent animals according to their kind, whilst others grow spontaneously and not from kindred stock; and of these instances of spontaneous generation some come from putrefying earth or vegetable matter, as is the case with a number of insects, while others are spontaneously generated in the inside of animals out of the secretions of their several organs.
In animals where generation goes by heredity, wherever there is duality of sex generation is due to copulation. In the group of fishes, however, there are some that are neither male nor female, and these, while they are identical generically with other fish, differ from them specifically; but there are others that stand altogether isolated and apart by themselves. Other fishes there are that are always female and never male, and from them are conceived what correspond to the wind-eggs [yolkless eggs] in birds. Such eggs, by the way, in birds are all unfruitful; but it is their nature to be independently capable of generation up to the egg-stage, unless indeed there be some other mode than the one familiar to us of intercourse with the male; but concerning these topics we shall treat more precisely later on. In the case of certain fishes, however, after they have spontaneously generated eggs, these eggs develop into living animals; only that in certain of these cases development is spontaneous, and in others is not independent of the male; and the method of proceeding in regard to these matters will be set forth by and by, for the method is somewhat like to the method followed in the case of birds. But whensoever creatures are spontaneously generated, either in other animals, in the soil, or on plants, or in the parts of these, and when such are generated male and female, then from the copulation of such spontaneously generated males and females there is generated a something -- a something never identical in shape with the parents, but a something imperfect. For instance, the issue of copulation in lice is nits; in flies, grubs; in fleas, grubs egg-like in shape; and from these issues the parent-species is never reproduced, nor is any animal produced at all, but the like nondescripts only....
15. Spontaneous generation in shelled animals.
...The testacean is almost the only genus that throughout all its species is non-copulative.
The ... purple murices [sea snails noted for their excretion of a fluid used to create a highly valued purple dye], gather together to some one place in the spring-time, and deposit the so-called 'honeycomb'. This substance resembles the comb, only that it is not so neat and delicate; and looks as though a number of husks of white chick-peas were all stuck together But none of these structures has any open passage, and the [purple murex] does not grow out of them, but these and all other testaceans grow out of mud and decaying matter.... Such, then, of the testaceans as deposit the honeycomb are generated spontaneously like all other testaceans, but they certainly come in greater abundance in places where their congeners [i.e., others of their kind] have been living previously....
With regard to the ... lagoon oysters, wherever you have slimy mud there you are sure to find them beginning to grow. Cockles and clams and razor-fishes and scallops grow spontaneously in sandy places....
As a general rule, then, all testaceans grow by spontaneous generation in mud, differing from one another according to the differences of the material; oysters growing in slime, and cockles and the other testaceans above mentioned on sandy bottoms; and in the hollows of the rocks the [sea squirt] and the barnacle, and common sorts, such as the limpet.... All these animals grow with great rapidity, especially the murex and the scallop; for the murex and the scallop attain their full growth in a year....
The hermit-crab grows spontaneously out of soil and slime, and finds its way into untenanted shells. As it grows it shifts to a larger shell.... After entering new shell, it carries it about, and begins again to feed, and, by and by, as it grows, it shifts again into another larger one.
16. Spontaneous generation in shell-less animals.
Moreover, the animals that are unfurnished with shells grow spontaneously, like the testaceans, as, for instance, the sea-nettles and the sponges in rocky caves.
Of the sea-nettle, or sea-anemone, there are two species; and of these one species lives in hollows and never loosens its hold upon the rocks, and the other lives on smooth flat reefs, free and detached, and shifts its position from time to time. [Limpets also detach themselves, and shift from place to place.]....
Sponges grow spontaneously either attached to a rock or on sea-beaches, and they get their nutriment in slime: a proof of this statement is the fact that when they are first secured they are found to be full of slime. This is characteristic of all living creatures that get their nutriment by close local attachment....
The sponge breeds parasites, worms, and other creatures, on which, if they be detached, the rock-fishes prey, as they prey also on the remaining stumps of the sponge; but, if the sponge be broken off, it grows again from the remaining stump and the place is soon as well covered as before....
19. Spontaneous generation in insects.
....And of insects some are derived from insect congeners, as the venom-spider and the common-spider from the venom-spider and the common-spider, and so with the ... locust, the ... grasshopper, and the ... cicada. Other insects are not derived from living parentage, but are generated spontaneously: some out of dew falling on leaves, ordinarily in spring-time, but not seldom in winter when there has been a stretch of fair weather and southerly winds; others grow in decaying mud or dung; others in timber, green or dry; some in the hair of animals; some in the flesh of animals; some in excrements: and some from excrement after it has been voided, and some from excrement yet within the living animal, like the ... intestinal worms.... These intestinal worms do not in any case propagate their kind. The flat-worm, however, in an exceptional way, clings fast to the gut, and lays a thing like a melon-seed, by observing which indication the physician concludes that his patient is troubled with the worm....
From the cabbage is engendered the cabbageworm, and from the leek the ... leekbane; this creature is also winged. From the flat animalcule that skims over the surface of rivers comes the ... gadfly; and this accounts for the fact that gadflies most abound in the neighbourhood of waters on whose surface these animalcules are observed. From a certain small, black and hairy caterpillar comes first a wingless glow-worm; and this creature again suffers a metamorphosis, and transforms into a winged insect named the bostrychus [a type of wood-boring beetle].
Gnats grow from ascarids [nematodes]; and ascarids are engendered in the slime of wells, or in places where there is a deposit left by the draining off of water. This slime decays, and first turns white, then black, and finally blood-red; and at this stage there originate in it, as it were, little tiny bits of red weed, which at first wriggle about all clinging together, and finally break loose and swim in the water, and are hereupon known as ascarids. After a few days they stand straight up on the water motionless and hard, and by and by the husk breaks off and the gnats are seen sitting upon it, until the sun's heat or a puff of wind sets them in motion, when they fly away.
With all grubs and all animals that break out from the grub state, generation is due primarily to the heat of the sun or to wind.
Ascarids are more likely to be found, and grow with unusual rapidity, in places where there is a deposit of a mixed and heterogeneous kind, as in kitchens and in ploughed fields, for the contents of such places are disposed to rapid putrefaction. In autumn, also, owing to the drying up of moisture, they grow in unusual numbers.
The tick is generated from couch-grass. The cockchafer comes from a grub that is generated in the dung of the cow or the ass. The cantharus or scarabeus rolls a piece of dung into a ball, lies hidden within it during the winter, and gives birth therein to small grubs, from which grubs come new canthari. Certain winged insects also come from the grubs that are found in pulse [a leguminous plant], in the same fashion as in the cases described.
Flies grow from grubs in the dung that farmers have gathered up into heaps: for those who are engaged in this work assiduously gather up the compost, and this they technically term 'working-up' the manure. The grub is exceedingly minute to begin with -- first even at this stage -- it assumes a reddish colour, and then from a quiescent state it takes on the power of motion, as though born to it; it then becomes a small motionless grub; it then moves again, and again relapses into immobility; it then comes out a perfect fly, and moves away under the influence of the sun's heat or of a puff of air. The ... horse-fly is engendered in timber. The ... budbane is a transformed grub; and this grub is engendered in cabbage-stalks. The cantharis [a type of beetle] comes from the caterpillars that are found on fig-trees or pear-trees or fir-trees -- for on all these grubs are engendered -- and also from caterpillars found on the dog-rose; and the cantharis takes eagerly to ill-scented substances, from the fact of its having been engendered in ill-scented woods. The conops [a wasp-mimicking fly] comes from a grub that is engendered in the slime of vinegar.
And, by the way, living animals are found in substances that are usually supposed to be incapable of putrefaction; for instance, worms are found in long-lying snow; and snow of this description gets reddish in colour, and the grub that is engendered in it is red, as might have been expected, and it is also hairy. The grubs found in the snows of Media [ancient kingdom located in the northwest region of modern Iran] are large and white; and all such grubs are little disposed to motion. In Cyprus, in places where copper-ore is smelted, with heaps of the ore piled on day after day, an animal is engendered in the fire, somewhat larger than a blue bottle fly, furnished with wings, which can hop or crawl through the fire. And the grubs and these latter animals perish when you keep the one away from the fire and the other from the snow....
On the river Hypanis [modern day Kuban River] in the Cimmerian Bosphorus [located in the region where the Sea of Azov opens into the Black Sea], about the time of the summer solstice, there are brought down towards the sea by the stream what look like little sacks rather bigger than grapes, out of which at their bursting issues a winged quadruped. The insect lives and flies about until the evening, but as the sun goes down it pines away, and dies at sunset having lived just one day, from which circumstance it is called the ephemeron....
21. Generation in bees.
With regard to the generation of bees different hypotheses are in vogue. Some affirm that bees neither copulate nor give birth to young, but that they fetch their young. And some say that they fetch their young from the flower of the callyntrum; others assert that they bring them from the flower of the reed, others, from the flower of the olive. And in respect to the olive theory, it is stated as a proof that, when the olive harvest is most abundant, the swarms are most numerous. Others declare that they fetch the brood of the drones from such things as above mentioned, but that the working bees are engendered by the rulers of the hive.
Now of these rulers there are two kinds: the better kind is red in colour, the inferior kind is black and variegated; the ruler is double the size of the working bee. These rulers have the abdomen or part below the waist half as large again, and they are called by some the 'mothers', from an idea that they bear or generate the bees; and, as a proof of this theory of their motherhood, they declare that the brood of the drones appears even when there is no ruler-bee in the hive, but that the bees do not appear in his absence. Others, again, assert that these insects copulate, and that the drones are male and the bees female.
The ordinary bee is generated in the cells of the comb, but the ruler-bees in cells down below attached to the comb, suspended from it, apart from the rest, six or seven in number, and growing in a way quite different from the mode of growth of the ordinary brood.
Bees are provided with a sting, but the drones are not so provided. The rulers are provided with stings, but they never use them; and this latter circumstance will account for the belief of some people that they have no stings at all....
31. Spontaneous generation in parasitic insects.
Of insects that are not carnivorous but that live on the juices of living flesh, such as lice and fleas and bugs, all, without exception, generate what are called 'nits', and these nits generate nothing.
Of these insects the flea is generated out of the slightest amount of putrefying matter; for wherever there is any dry excrement, a flea is sure to be found. Bugs are generated from the moisture of living animals, as it dries up outside their bodies. Lice are generated out of the flesh of animals.
When lice are coming there is a kind of small eruption visible, unaccompanied by any discharge of purulent matter; and, if you prick an animal when in this condition at the spot of eruption, the lice jump out. In some men the appearance of lice is a disease, in cases where the body is surcharged with moisture; and, indeed, men have been known to succumb to this louse-disease, as Alcman the poet and the Syrian Pherecydes are said to have done. Moreover, in certain diseases lice appear in great abundance.
There is also a species of louse called the 'wild louse', and this is harder than the ordinary louse, and there is exceptional difficulty in getting the skin rid of it. Boys' heads are apt to be lousy, but men's in less degree; and women are more subject to lice than men. But, whenever people are troubled with lousy heads, they are less than ordinarily troubled with headache. And lice are generated in other animals than man. For birds are infested with them; and pheasants, unless they clean themselves in the dust, are actually destroyed by them. All other winged animals that are furnished with feathers are similarly infested, and all hair-coated creatures also, with the single exception of the ass, which is infested neither with lice nor with ticks.
Cattle suffer both from lice and from ticks. Sheep and goats breed ticks, but do not breed lice. Pigs breed lice large and hard. In dogs are found the flea peculiar to the animal.... In all animals that are subject to lice, the latter originate from the animals themselves. Moreover, in animals that bathe at all, lice are more than usually abundant when they change the water in which they bathe.
In the sea, lice are found on fishes, but they are generated not out of the fish but out of slime; and they resemble multipedal wood-lice, only that their tail is flat. Sea-lice are uniform in shape and universal in locality, and are particularly numerous on the body of the red mullet. And all these insects are multipedal and devoid of blood.
The parasite that feeds on the tunny is found in the region of the fins; it resembles a scorpion, and is about the size of a spider. In the seas between Cyrene [ancient Greek city near modern day Shahat, Libya] and Egypt there is a fish that attends on the dolphin, which is called the 'dolphin's louse'. This fish gets exceedingly fat from enjoying an abundance of food while the dolphin is out in pursuit of its prey.
32. The spontaneous generation in other living things.
Other animalcules besides these are generated, as we have already remarked, some in wool or in articles made of wool, as the ... clothes-moth. And these animalcules come in greater numbers if the woollen substances are dusty; and they come in especially large numbers if a spider be shut up in the cloth or wool, for the creature drinks up any moisture that may be there, and dries up the woollen substance. This grub is found also in men's clothes.
A creature is also found in wax long laid by, just as in wood, and it is the smallest of animalcules and is white in colour, and is designated the acari or mite. In books also other animalcules are found, some resembling the grubs found in garments, and some resembling tailless scorpions, but very small. As a general rule we may state that such animalcules are found in practically anything, both in dry things that are becoming moist and in moist things that are drying, provided they contain the conditions of life....
The fruit of the wild fig contains the ... fig-wasp. This creature is a grub at first; but in due time the husk peels off and [the fig-wasp] leaves the husk behind it and flies away, and enters into the fruit of the fig-tree through its orifice, and causes the fruit not to drop off; and with a view to this phenomenon, country folk are in the habit of tying wild figs on to fig-trees, and of planting wild fig-trees near domesticated ones....
BOOK VI
15. Spontaneous generation in fish.
The great majority of fish, then, as has been stated, proceed from eggs. However, there are some fish that proceed from mud and sand, even of those kinds that proceed also from pairing and the egg. This occurs in ponds here and there, and especially in a pond in the neighbourhood of Cnidos. This pond, it is said, at one time ran dry about the rising of the Dogstar [Sirius], and the mud had all dried up; at the first fall of the rains there was a show of water in the pond, and on the first appearance of the water shoals of tiny fish were found in the pond. The fish in question was a kind of mullet, one which does not proceed from normal pairing, about the size of a small sprat, and not one of these fishes was provided with either spawn or milt. There are found also in Asia Minor, in rivers not communicating with the sea, little fishes like whitebait, differing from the small fry found near Cnidos but found under similar circumstances. Some writers actually aver that mullet all grow spontaneously. In this assertion they are mistaken, for the female of the fish is found provided with spawn, and the male with milt. However, there is a species of mullet that grows spontaneously out of mud and sand.
From the facts above enumerated it is quite proved that certain fishes come spontaneously into existence, not being derived from eggs or from copulation. Such fish as are neither oviparous nor viviparous arise all from one of two sources, from mud, or from sand and from decayed matter that rises thence as a scum; for instance, the so-called froth of the small fry comes out of sandy ground. This fry is incapable of growth and of propagating its kind; after living for a while it dies away and another creature takes its place, and so, with short intervals excepted, it may be said to last the whole year through.... As a proof that these fish occasionally come out of the ground we have the fact that in cold weather they are not caught, and that they are caught in warm weather, obviously coming up out of the ground to catch the heat; also, when the fishermen use dredges and the ground is scraped up fairly often, the fishes appear in larger numbers and of superior quality.... The fry are found in sheltered and marshy districts, when after a spell of fine weather the ground is getting warmer, as, for instance, in the neighbourhood of Athens, at Salamis and near the tomb of Themistocles and at Marathon; for in these districts the froth is found. It ... occasionally appears after a heavy fall of rain in the froth that is thrown up by the falling rain, from which circumstance the substance derives its specific name. Foam is occasionally brought in on the surface of the sea in fair weather. [And in this, where it has formed on the surface, the so-called froth collects, as grubs swarm in manure....]
16. Spontaneous generation in eels.
Eels are not the issue of pairing, neither are they oviparous; nor was an eel ever found supplied with either milt or spawn, nor are they when cut open found to have within them passages for spawn or for eggs. In point of fact, this entire species of blooded animals proceeds neither from pair nor from the egg.
There can be no doubt that the case is so. For in some standing pools, after the water has been drained off and the mud has been dredged away, the eels appear again after a fall of rain. In time of drought they do not appear even in stagnant ponds, for the simple reason that their existence and sustenance is derived from rain-water.
There is no doubt, then, that they proceed neither from pairing nor from an egg. Some writers, however, are of opinion that they generate their kind, because in some eels little worms are found, from which they suppose that eels are derived. But this opinion is not founded on fact. Eels are derived from the so-called 'earth's guts' that grow spontaneously in mud and in humid ground; in fact, eels have at times been seen to emerge out of such earthworms, and on other occasions have been rendered visible when the earthworms were laid open by either scraping or cutting. Such earthworms are found both in the sea and in rivers, especially where there is decayed matter: in the sea in places where sea-weed abounds, and in rivers and marshes near to the edge; for it is near to the water's edge that sun-heat has its chief power and produces putrefaction. So much for the generation of the eel.
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