SECT, i] EMBRYOLOGY IN ANTIQUITY 65 



and some of his observations were quite incorrect. Moreover, he 

 stood at the very entrance into an entirely unworked field of know- 

 ledge ; he had only to examine, as it were, every animal that he could 

 find, and set down the results of his work, for nobody had ever done 

 it before. It was like the great days of nineteenth-century physiology, 

 when, as the saying was, "a chance cut with a scalpel might reveal 

 something of the first importance". 



As has already been said, Aristotle regarded the menstrual blood 

 as the material out of which the embryo was made. "That, then, the 

 female does not contribute semen to generation", says Aristotle, "but 

 does contribute something, and that this is the matter of the cata- 

 menia, or that which is analogous to it in bloodless animals, is clear 

 from what has been said, and also from a general and abstract survey 

 of the question. For there must needs be that which generates and 

 that from which it generates, even if these be one, still they must 

 be distinct in form and their essence must be different; and in those 

 animals that have these powers separate in two sexes the body and 

 nature of the active and passive sex also differ. If, then, the male 

 stands for the effective and active, and the female, considered as 

 female, for the passive, it follows that what the female would con- 

 tribute to the semen of the male would not be semen but material 

 for the semen to work upon. This is just what we find to be the case, 

 for the catamenia have in their nature an affinity to the primitive 

 matter." Thus the male dynamic element {t6 appev iroLn^TtKov) gives a 

 shape to the plastic female element {to OrjXv TradrjTiKov). Aristotle 

 was right to the extent that the menstrual flow is associated with 

 ovulation, but as he knew nothing of the mammalian ovum, and 

 indeed, as is shown in his embryological classification, expressly denied 

 that there was such a thing, his main menstruation theory is wrong. 

 Yet it was not an illegitimate deduction from the facts before him. 



These views of Aristotle's about the contribution of the female to 

 the embryo are in striking contrast with certain conceptions of a 

 century before which were probably generally held in Greece. There 

 is a most interesting passage relating to them in the Eumenides of 

 Aeschylus, when, during the trial scene, Apollo, defending Orestes 

 from the charge of matricide, brings forward a physiological argu- 

 ment. "The mother of what is called her child", Apollo is made to 

 say, "is no parent of it, but nurse only of the young Hfe that is sown 

 in her (jpo(f)6<; 8e Kv^iajo<i veoairopov). The parent is the male, and 



