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 8

So much for the modes of sexual intercourse in all animals; but, with regard to the same phenomenon, there are definite laws followed as regards the season of the year and the age of the animal.

Animals in general seem naturally disposed to this intercourse at about the same period of the year, and that is when winter is changing into summer. And this is the season of spring, in which almost all things that fly or walk or swim take to pairing. Some animals pair and breed in autumn also and in winter, as is the case with certain aquatic animals and certain birds. Man pairs and breeds at all seasons, as is the case also with domesticated animals, owing to the shelter and good feeding they enjoy: that is to say, with those whose period of gestation is also comparatively brief, as the sow and the bitch, and with those birds that breed frequently. Many animals time the season of intercourse with a view to the right nurture subsequently of their young. In the human species, the male is more under sexual excitement in winter, and the female in summer.

With birds the far greater part, as has been said, pair and breed during the spring and early summer, with the exception of the halcyon.

The halcyon breeds at the season of the winter solstice. Accordingly, when this season is marked with calm weather, the name of 'halcyon days' is given to the seven days preceding, and to as many following, the solstice; as Simonides the poet says:

God lulls for fourteen days the winds to sleep In winter; and this temperate interlude Men call the Holy Season, when the deep Cradles the mother Halcyon and her brood.

And these days are calm, when southerly winds prevail at the solstice, northerly ones having been the accompaniment of the Pleiads. The halcyon is said to take seven days for building her nest, and the other seven for laying and hatching her eggs. In our country there are not always halcyon days about the time of the winter solstice, but in the Sicilian seas this season of calm is almost periodical. The bird lays about five eggs.

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