Aristotle, Second Part of THE HISTORY OF ANIMALS Complete

Translated by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

II: 128 pages - You are on Page 52

Part 9

Peafowl live for about twenty-five years, breed about the third year, and at the same time take on their spangled plumage. They hatch their eggs within thirty days or rather more. The peahen lays but once a year, and lays twelve eggs, or may be a slightly lesser number: she does not lay all the eggs there and then one after the other, but at intervals of two or three days. Such as lay for the first time lay about eight eggs. The peahen lays wind-eggs. They pair in the spring; and laying begins immediately after pairing. The bird moults when the earliest trees are shedding their leaves, and recovers its plumage when the same trees are recovering their foliage. People that rear peafowl put the eggs under the barn-door hen, owing to the fact that when the peahen is brooding over them the peacock attacks her and tries to trample on them; owing to this circumstance some birds of wild varieties run away from the males and lay their eggs and brood in solitude. Only two eggs are put under a barn-door hen, for she could not brood over and hatch a large number. They take every precaution, by supplying her with food, to prevent her going off the eggs and discontinuing the brooding.

With male birds about pairing time the testicles are obviously larger than at other times, and this is conspicuously the case with the more salacious birds, such as the barn-door cock and the cock partridge; the peculiarity is less conspicuous in such birds as are intermittent in regard to pairing.

Part 10

So much for the conception and generation of birds. It has been previously stated that fishes are not all oviparous. Fishes of the cartilaginous genus are viviparous; the rest are oviparous. And cartilaginous fishes are first oviparous internally and subsequently viviparous; they rear the embryos internally, the batrachus or fishing-frog being an exception.

Fishes also, as was above stated, are provided with wombs, and wombs of diverse kinds. The oviparous genera have wombs bifurcate in shape and low down in position; the cartilaginous genus have wombs shaped like those of O birds. The womb, however, in the cartilaginous fishes differs in this respect from the womb of birds, that with some cartilaginous fishes the eggs do not settle close to the diaphragm but middle-ways along the backbone, and as they grow they shift their position.

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