SECT. 2] TO THE RENAISSANCE 99 



in the hen's egg after the chick has hatched. There is a similar virtue 

 in the liver and heart of animals which organs after the animals are 

 born form the flesh and fat from food in accordance with its twofold 

 substance, and expel the refuse as we said before," 



In the sixth book, Albert contradicts Aristotle's opinion that male 

 chick develops out of the sharp-ended egg, and one hopes that he 

 is going to say there is no relationship between egg-shape and sex, 

 but no, he goes on to say that the Aristotelian statement rested on a 

 textual error (in which he was quite wrong), so that really Aristode 

 agreed with Avicenna in saying that the males always develop from 

 the more spherical eggs because the sphere is the most perfect of figures 

 in solid geometry. These errors had a most persistent life : Horace has 

 a passage in which they appear — 



longa quibus facies ovis erit, ilia memento 

 ut suci melioris, et ut magis alma rotundis 

 ponere: namque marem cohibent callosa vitellu.m. 



(When you would feast upon eggs, make choice of the long ones ; they 

 are whiter and sweeter and more nourishing than the round, for being 

 hard they contain the yolk of the male.) 



They were finally abolished by two naturalists, Giinther and Biihle, 

 who took the trouble to disprove them experimentally in the eigh- 

 teenth century. Albertus refers here to artificial incubation: "For 

 the alterative and maturative heat", he says, "of the egg is in 

 the egg itself and the warmth which the bird provides is altogether 

 external [extrinsecus est amminiculans] since in certain hot countries 

 the eggs of fowls are put under the surface of the earth and come 

 to completion of their own accord, as in Egypt, for the Egyptians 

 hatch them out by placing them under dung in the sunlight". 

 Next he speaks of monsters and of the modes of corruption 

 of eggs which he divides into four: (i) decomposition of white, 

 (2) decomposition of yolk, (3) bursting of the yolk-membrane, 

 (4) antiquitas ovi. "And from the second cause it sometimes happens ", 

 he says, "that in the corruption of the humours certain igneous 

 parts are carried blazing to the shell of the egg and distribute them- 

 selves over it so that it shines in the dark like rotten wood; as 

 happened in the case of that egg^ which Avicenna said he saw in 

 the city called Kanetrizine in the country of the Gorascenes." Albert 



^ See on this subject Zach. 



7-2 



