GENERATION OF ANIMALS, V. in. 



On the other hand, Ethiopians and people who Uve 

 in hot regions have curly hair, because both their 

 brain and the environing air are dry. 



Some, however, of the thick-skinned animals have 

 fine hair o^nng to the cause pre\"iously mentioned •* : 

 the finer the passages are, the finer of necessity must 

 the hairs be. That is why all sheep have fine hair, 

 wool being just a very large number of hairs. There 

 are some animals whose hair is soft, yet not so fine ; 

 this is true of hares, for instance, in comparison with 

 sheep. In such animals tie hair is on the surface of 

 the skin ; and so it is not long, but turns out to be 

 very much on a par with the scrapings that come off 

 linen cloth, which have no length worth mentioning, 

 but are soft and cannot be used for weaving. In cold 

 climates sheep and human beings exhibit opposite 

 " conditions " from each other : thus the Scythians 

 have soft hair, but Sarmatian * sheep have hard hair, 

 the reason for which is the same as it is in all \\ild 

 animals. The cold congeals them and so dries them, 

 and this makes them hard : in other words, the fluid 

 evaporates at the same time as the heat is expelled, 

 and both hair and skin become earthy and hard. Thus 

 with wild animals the reason is that they live in the 

 open air ; but in other cases it is the nature of their 

 situation which is responsible. This is shown by 

 what occurs in the case of the sea-urchins which are 

 used as a remedy for cases of strangury. These 

 creatures, although small in themselves, have long, 

 hard spines, because the seawater they hve in is cold 

 on account of its being so deep (60 fathoms or even 



" See 783 b 1. 



* Sarmatia is the territory between the Vistula and the 

 Don, part of modern Poland and Russia. 



519 



