it

has claws also on these parts resembling those of birds of prey. Its
body is rough all over, like that of the crocodile. Its eyes are
situated in a hollow recess, and are very large and round, and are
enveloped in a skin resembling that which covers the entire body;
and in the middle a slight aperture is left for vision, through
which the animal sees, for it never covers up this aperture with the
cutaneous envelope. It keeps twisting its eyes round and shifting
its line of vision in every direction, and thus contrives to get a
sight of any object that it wants to see. The change in its colour
takes place when it is inflated with air; it is then black, not unlike
the crocodile, or green like the lizard but black-spotted like the
pard.

The chameleon

resembles the lizard in the general configuration of
its body, but the ribs stretch downwards and meet together under the
belly as is the case with fishes, and the spine sticks up as with
the fish. Its face resembles that of the baboon. Its tail is
exceedingly long, terminates in a sharp point, and is for the most
part coiled up, like a strap of leather. It stands higher off the
ground than the lizard, but the flexure of the legs is the same in
both creatures. Each of its feet is divided into two parts, which bear
the same relation to one another that the thumb and the rest of the
hand bear to one another in man. Each of these parts is for a short
distance divided after a fashion into toes; on the front feet the
inside part is divided into three and the outside into two, on the
hind feet the inside part into two and the outside into three;

crocodile

River crocodiles have pigs' eyes, large teeth and tusks, and
strong nails, and an impenetrable skin composed of scaly plates.
They see but poorly under water, but above the surface of it with
remarkable acuteness. As a rule, they pass the day-time on land and
the nighttime in the water; for the temperature of the water is at
night-time more genial than that of the open air.

This latter animal,

by the way, resembles certain fishes. For, as
a general rule, fishes have a prickly tongue, not free in its
movements; though there are some fishes that present a smooth
undifferentiated surface where the tongue should be, until you open
their mouths wide and make a close inspection.

Again, oviparous blooded quadrupeds are unprovided with ears, but
possess only the passage for hearing; neither have they breasts, nor a
copulatory organ, nor external testicles, but internal ones only;
neither are they hair coated, but are in all cases covered with
scaly plates. Moreover, they are without exception saw-toothed.

The monkey,

as has been observed, is furnished with a tail. In
all such creatures the internal organs are found under dissection to
correspond to those of man.

So much then for the properties of the organs of such animals
as bring forth their young into the world alive.

10

Oviparous and blooded quadrupeds-and, by the way, no terrestrial
blooded animal is oviparous unless it is quadrupedal or is devoid of
feet altogether-are furnished with a head, a neck, a back, upper and
under parts, the front legs and hind legs, and the part analogous to
the chest, all as in the case of viviparous quadrupeds, and with a
tail, usually large, in exceptional cases small. And all these
creatures are many-toed, and the several toes are cloven apart.
Furthermore, they all have the ordinary organs of sensation, including
a tongue, with the exception of the Egyptian crocodile.

Its upper-arm

and thigh are short in proportion to the
forearm and the shin. It has no projecting navel, but only a
hardness in the ordinary locality of the navel. Its upper part is much
larger than its lower part, as is the case with quadrupeds; in fact,
the proportion of the former to the latter is about as five to
three. Owing to this circumstance and to the fact that its feet
resemble hands and are composed in a manner of hand and of foot: of
foot in the heel extremity, of the hand in all else-for even the
toes have what is called a 'palm':-for these reasons the animal is
oftener to be found on all fours than upright. It has neither hips,
inasmuch as it is a quadruped, nor yet a tail, inasmuch as it is a
biped, except nor yet a tal by the way that it has a tail as small
as small can be, just a sort of indication of a tail. The genitals
of the female resemble those of the female in the human species; those
of the male are more like those of a dog than are those of a man.

The ape

has also in its chest two teats upon poorly developed
breasts. It has also arms like man, only covered with hair, and it
bends these legs like man, with the convexities of both limbs facing
one another. In addition, it has hands and fingers and nails like man,
only that all these parts are somewhat more beast-like in
appearance. Its feet are exceptional in kind. That is, they are like
large hands, and the toes are like fingers, with the middle one the
longest of all, and the under part of the foot is like a hand except
for its length, and stretches out towards the extremities like the
palm of the hand; and this palm at the after end is unusually hard,
and in a clumsy obscure kind of way resembles a heel. The creature
uses its feet either as hands or feet, and doubles them up as one
doubles a fist.

Some animals share

the properties of man and the quadrupeds, as
the ape, the monkey, and the baboon. The monkey is a tailed ape. The
baboon resembles the ape in form, only that it is bigger and stronger,
more like a dog in face, and is more savage in its habits, and its
teeth are more dog-like and more powerful.

Apes are hairy on the back in keeping with their quadrupedal
nature, and hairy on the belly in keeping with their human form-for,
as was said above, this characteristic is reversed in man and the
quadruped-only that the hair is coarse, so that the ape is thickly
coated both on the belly and on the back. Its face resembles that of
man in many respects; in other words, it has similar nostrils and
ears, and teeth like those of man, both front teeth and molars.
Further, whereas quadrupeds in general are not furnished with lashes
on one of the two eyelids, this creature has them on both, only very
thinly set, especially the under ones; in fact they are very
insignificant indeed. And we must bear in mind that all other
quadrupeds have no under eyelash at all.

The tongue of the elephant is exceedingly small, and situated
far back in the mouth, so that it is difficult to get a sight of it.

7

Furthermore, animals differ from one another in the relative size
of their mouths. In some animals the mouth opens wide, as is the
case with the dog, the lion, and with all the saw-toothed animals;
other animals have small mouths, as man; and others have mouths of
medium capacity, as the pig and his congeners.

(The Egyptian hippopotamus has a mane like a horse, is
cloven-footed like an ox, and is snub-nosed. It has a huckle-bone like
cloven-footed animals, and tusks just visible; it has the tail of a
pig, the neigh of a horse, and the dimensions of an ass. The hide is
so thick that spears are made out of it. In its internal organs it
resembles the horse and the ass.)

The last teeth to come in man are molars called 'wisdom-teeth',
which come at the age of twenty years, in the case of both sexes.
Cases have been known in women upwards. of eighty years old where at
the very close of life the wisdom-teeth have come up, causing great
pain in their coming; and cases have been known of the like phenomenon
in men too. This happens, when it does happen, in the case of people
where the wisdom-teeth have not come up in early years.

5

The elephant has four teeth on either side, by which it munches
its food, grinding it like so much barley-meal, and, quite apart
from these, it has its great teeth, or tusks, two in number. In the
male these tusks are comparatively large and curved upwards; in the
female, they are comparatively small and point in the opposite
direction; that is, they look downwards towards the ground. The
elephant is furnished with teeth at birth, but the tusks are not
then visible.

In this particular,

the horse differs entirely from animals in
general: for, generally speaking, as animals grow older their teeth
get blacker, but the horse's teeth grow whiter with age.

The so-called 'canines' come in between the sharp teeth and the
broad or blunt ones, partaking of the form of both kinds; for they are
broad at the base and sharp at the tip.

Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep,
goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not
yet been made: but the more teeth they have the more long-lived are
they, as a rule, while those are short-lived in proportion that have
teeth fewer in number and thinly set.

With regard to dogs some doubts are entertained, as some contend
that they shed no teeth whatever, and others that they shed the
canines, but those alone; the fact being, that they do shed their
teeth like man, but that the circumstance escapes observation, owing
to the fact that they never shed them until equivalent teeth have
grown within the gums to take the place of the shed ones. We shall
be justified in supposing that the case is similar with wild beasts in
general; for they are said to shed their canines only. Dogs can be
distinguished from one another, the young from the old, by their
teeth; for the teeth in young dogs are white and sharp-pointed; in old
dogs, black and blunt.

No animal

of these genera is provided with double rows of
teeth. There is, however, an animal of the sort, if we are to
believe Ctesias. He assures us that the Indian wild beast called the
'martichoras' has a triple row of teeth in both upper and lower jaw;
that it is as big as a lion and equally hairy, and that its feet
resemble those of the lion; that it resembles man in its face and
ears; that its eyes are blue, and its colour vermilion; that its
tail is like that of the land-scorpion; that it has a sting in the
tail, and has the faculty of shooting off arrow-wise the spines that
are attached to the tail; that the sound of its voice is a something
between the sound of a pan-pipe and that of a trumpet; that it can run
as swiftly as deer, and that it is savage and a man-eater.

Man sheds his teeth, and so do other animals, as the horse, the
mule, and the ass. And man sheds his front teeth; but there is no
instance of an animal that sheds its molars. The pig sheds none of its
teeth at all.

and by 'saw-toothed' we mean

such animals as interlock the sharp-pointed teeth in one jaw between
the sharp-pointed ones in the other. No animal is there that possesses
both tusks and horns, nor yet do either of these structures exist in
any animal possessed of 'saw-teeth'. The front teeth are usually
sharp, and the back ones blunt. The seal is saw-toothed throughout,
inasmuch as he is a sort of link with the class of fishes; for
fishes are almost all saw-toothed.

Again,

in respect to the teeth, animals differ greatly both
from one another and from man. All animals that are quadrupedal,
blooded and viviparous, are furnished with teeth; but, to begin
with, some are double-toothed (or fully furnished with teeth in both
jaws), and some are not. For instance, horned quadrupeds are not
double-toothed; for they have not got the front teeth in the upper
jaw; and some hornless animals, also, are not double toothed, as the
camel. Some animals have tusks, like the boar, and some have not.
Further, some animals are saw-toothed, such as the lion, the pard, and
the dog; and some have teeth that do not interlock but have flat
opposing crowns, as the horse and the ox;

When animals arrive at maturity,

their properties are as above
stated; but they differ greatly from one another in their growth
towards maturity. For instance, man, when young, has his upper part
larger than the lower, but in course of growth he comes to reverse
this condition; and it is owing to this circumstance that-an
exceptional instance, by the way-he does not progress in early life as
he does at maturity, but in infancy creeps on all fours; but some
animals, in growth, retain the relative proportion of the parts, as
the dog. Some animals at first have the upper part smaller and the
lower part larger, and in course of growth the upper part gets to be
the larger, as is the case with the bushy-tailed animals such as the
horse; for in their case there is never, subsequently to birth, any
increase in the part extending from the hoof to the haunch.