ON GENERATION. 2/1 



the male and the female, equally endued with the virtue of 

 either, and constituting an unity from which a single animal is 

 engendered. 



Nor is it the beginning only, but the fruit and conclusion like- 

 wise. It is the beginning as regards the being to be engendered; 

 the fruit in respect of the two parents : at once the end proposed 

 in their engendering, and the origin of the chick that is to be. 

 "But the seed and the fruit," according to Aristotle, 1 "differ 

 from one another in the relations of prior and posterior; for the 

 fruit is that which comes of another, the seed is that from which 

 this other comes : were it otherwise, both would be the same." 



The egg also seems to be a certain mean; not merely in so far 

 as it is beginning and end, but as it is the common work of the 

 two sexes and is compounded by both; containing within itself 

 the matter and the plastic power, it has the virtue of both, by 

 which it produces a foetus that resembles the one as well as the 

 other. It is farther a mean between the animate and the in- 

 animate world; for neither is it wholly endowed with life, nor is 

 it entirely without vitality. It is still farther the mid-passage or 

 transition stage between parents and offspring, between those 

 who are, or were, and those who are about to be; it is the hinge 

 and pivot upon which the whole generation of the bird revolves. 

 The egg is the terminus from which all fowls, male and female, 

 have sprung, and to which all their lives tend, it is the result 

 which nature has proposed to herself in their being. And thus 

 it comes that individuals in procreating their like for the sake of 

 their species, endure for ever. The egg, I say, is a period or 

 portion of this eternity; for it were hard to say whether an egg 

 exists for the sake of the chick that it engenders, or the pullet 

 exists for the sake of the egg which it is to engender. Which of 

 these was the prior, whether with reference to time or nature, 

 the egg or the pullet? This question, when we come to speak of 

 the generation of animals in general, we shall discuss at length. 



The egg, moreover, and this is especially to be noted, 

 corresponds in its proportions with the seeds of plants, and has 

 all the same conditions as these, so that it is to be regarded, not 

 without reason, as the seed or sperma of the common fowl, 



1 De Gen. Anim. lib. i, cap. 13. 



