GENERATION OF ANIMALS 



with Soul in them "), the heavenly bodies act as a 

 Motive Cause, for " man is begotten by man and by the 

 Sun " (see App. A §§ 6, 9). 



Veieai^, yiyi€cr6ai 



(52) Tevems. as we have already seen (§ 47), is a process Meaning, 

 of change ; in fact, it is the most fundamental sort of 

 change, viz., " coming into being " ; hence, the product 

 resulting from a process of yeveais is some ovaia, for 

 although some sorts of ovaia persist eternally, there are 

 others which are " perishable," i.e., which are subject 



to yo-effts and iOopd (see App. A §§ 1, 1-2, 16). Indeed, 

 the sort of ovaia produced by the yeveai? with which 

 our present treatise is concerned — animals and plants — 

 is the ovaia which Aristotle considers to have the best 

 claim to the name (App. A § 18). 



(53) Teveais, and its verb yiyveaSai, are terms of frequent Translation. 

 occurrence in Aristotle, and especially in G.A. In the 



title of the treatise, yiveais is commonly translated 

 " generation," and this is a Convenient rendering of it 

 there : but we must not forget that yeveois also refers to 

 the whole process of an animal's development until it 

 has reached its completion ; that is to say, yeveais 

 includes the whole subject of reproduction and embryo- 

 logy. In the body of the treatise " generation " is often 

 not satisfactory as a translation ; nor is " coming-to-be" 

 particularly neat or indeed appropriate in a biological 

 work. I have therefore commonly used " formation," 

 " process of formation " and the like to render yevcai?, 

 and for yiyv€a6ai " to be formed," " to come to be 

 formed," etc. 



SwicTTarai, (rvvi(TTaucrdai 



(54) Another verb closely connected with yiyveaOai is the Meaning, 

 verb owioTovoi, which might almost be regarded as the 

 active voice of yiyveadai, though avviaravai tends rather 



to refer to the beginning of the process. It is specially 

 frequent in passages describing the initial action of the 

 semen in constituting a " fetation " out of "the menstrual 

 fluid of the female, and it is also used by Aristotle to 

 describe the action of rennet upon milk, a parallel 



Ixi 



