It is said by some, as by Anaxagoras and other of the
physicists, that this antithesis exists from the beginning in the
germs or seeds; for the germ, they say, comes from the male while
the female only provides the place in which it is to be developed, and
the male is from the right, the female from the left testis, and so
also that the male embryo is in the right of the uterus, the female in
the left. Others, as Empedocles, say that the differentiation takes
place in the uterus; for he says that if the uterus is hot or cold
what enters it becomes male or female, the cause of the heat or cold
being the flow of the catamenia, according as it is colder or
hotter, more 'antique' or more 'recent'. Democritus of Abdera also
says that the differentiation of sex takes place within the mother;
that however it is not because of heat and cold that one embryo
becomes female and another male, but that it depends on the question
which parent it is whose semen prevails,- not the whole of the
semen, but that which has come from the part by which male and
female differ from one another. This is a better theory, for certainly
Empedocles has made a rather light-hearted assumption in thinking that
the difference between them is due only to cold and heat, when he
saw that there was a great difference in the whole of the sexual
parts, the difference in fact between the male pudenda and the uterus.
For suppose two animals already moulded in embryo, the one having
all the parts of the female, the other those of the male; suppose them
then to be put into the uterus as into an oven, the former when the
oven is hot, the latter when it is cold; then on the view of
Empedocles that which has no uterus will be female and that which
has will be male.
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