Moreover, they know not that these parts of animals contribute nothing
to the production of one sex rather than the other; a proof of this is
that many animals in which the distinction of sex exists, and which
produce both male and female offspring, nevertheless have no testes,
as the footless animals; I mean the classes of fish and of serpents.
To suppose, then, either that heat and cold are the causes of male
and female, or that the different sexes come from the right and
left, is not altogether unreasonable in itself; for the right of the
body is hotter than the left, and the concocted semen is hotter than
the unconcocted; again, the thickened is concocted, and the more
thickened is more fertile. Yet to put it in this way is to seek for
the cause from too remote a starting-point; we must draw near the
immediate causes in so far as it is possible for us.
We have, then, previously spoken elsewhere of both the body as a
whole and its parts, explaining what each part is and for what
reason it exists. But (1) the male and female are distinguished by a
certain capacity and incapacity. (For the male is that which can
concoct the blood into semen and which can form and secrete and
discharge a semen carrying with it the principle of form- by
'principle' I do not mean a material principle out of which comes into
being an offspring resembling the parent, but I mean the first
moving cause, whether it have power to act as such in the thing itself
or in something else- but the female is that which receives semen,
indeed, but cannot form it for itself or secrete or discharge it.
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