Aristotle THE HISTORY OF ANIMALS Complete

Translated by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

128 pages - You are on Page 94

All milk is composed of a watery serum called 'whey', and a consistent substance called curd (or cheese); and the thicker the milk, the more abundant the curd. The milk, then, of non-ambidentals coagulates, and that is why cheese is made of the milk of such animals under domestication; but the milk of ambidentals does not coagulate, nor their fat either, and the milk is thin and sweet. Now the camel's milk is the thinnest, and that of the human species next after it, and that of the ass next again, but cow's milk is the thickest. Milk does not coagulate under the influence of cold, but rather runs to whey; but under the influence of heat it coagulates and thickens. As a general rule milk only comes to animals in pregnancy. When the animal is pregnant milk is found, but for a while it is unfit for use, and then after an interval of usefulness it becomes unfit for use again. In the case of female animals not pregnant a small quantity of milk has been procured by the employment of special food, and cases have been actually known where women advanced in years on being submitted to the process of milking have produced milk, and in some cases have produced it in sufficient quantities to enable them to suckle an infant.

The people that live on and about Mount Oeta take such she-goats as decline the male and rub their udders hard with nettles to cause an irritation amounting to pain; hereupon they milk the animals, procuring at first a liquid resembling blood, then a liquid mixed with purulent matter, and eventually milk, as freely as from females submitting to the male.

As a general rule, milk is not found in the male of man or of any other animal, though from time to time it has been found in a male; for instance, once in Lemnos a he-goat was milked by its dugs (for it has, by the way, two dugs close to the penis), and was milked to such effect that cheese was made of the produce, and the same phenomenon was repeated in a male of its own begetting. Such occurrences, however, are regarded as supernatural and fraught with omen as to futurity, and in point of fact when the Lemnian owner of the animal inquired of the oracle, the god informed him that the portent foreshadowed the acquisition of a fortune. With some men, after puberty, milk can be produced by squeezing the breasts; cases have been known where on their being subjected to a prolonged milking process a considerable quantity of milk has been educed.

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