GENERATION OF ANIMALS, II. iv. 



the first principle of any natural creature's system is 

 the heart or its counterpart, while the lower parts 

 are an appendage added for the sake of that.) Why 

 does this generative residue, then, not occur in all 

 males, although it occurs in all females .'' The answer 

 is that an animal is a living body, a body with Soul 

 in it. The female always pro\ides the material, the 

 male provides that which fashions the material into 

 shape ; this, in our view, is the specific characteristic 

 of each of the sexes : that is what it means to be 

 male or to be female. Hence, necessity requires that 

 the female should provide the physical part, i.e., a 

 quantity of material, but not that the male should do 

 so, since necessity does not require that the tools 

 should reside in the product that is being made, nor 

 that the agent which uses them should do so. Thus 

 the physical part, the body, comes from the female, 

 and the Soul from the male, since the Soul is the 

 essence " of a particular body. On this account, 

 when a male and a female of different species copulate 

 (which happens in the case of animals whose periods 

 are equal and whose times of gestation run close, 

 and which do not differ widely in physical size), the 

 first generation, so far as resemblance goes, takes 

 equally after both parents (examples are the offspring 

 of fox and dog,* and of partridge and common fowl), 

 but as time goes on and successive generations are 

 produced, the offspring finish up by taking after the 

 female as regards their bodily form, just as happens 

 when seeds are introduced into a strange locahty — 

 the plants take after the soil, the reason being that 



statements that no part of the body can be such in anything 



but name unless it has Soul in it ; see also P. A. 641 a 25 ff. 



* Viz., the so-called Laconian hound ; see H.A. 607 a 3. 



185 



