The Lagoon

by Armand Marie Leroi

  It is not, however, copulatory topology but reproductive physiology that gives the essential difference between the sexes. Aristotle argues that males and females both produce a reproductive residue, sperma – seed. The male seed is gonē – semen – which he supposes is hyper-refined blood and, like all metabolic residues, completely uniform in composition. The female seed is katamēnia – menstrual fluid. This latter claim will strike the modern reader as peculiar, but it’s all of a piece with his physiology.

  Since embryos require nutrition, and blood is the purest form of nutrition, it’s obvious that the menses, which are clearly pretty blood-like, should be the stuff from which an embryo is formed. Furthermore, the monthly discharge can be explained as unused seed which, in turn, neatly explains why girls become fertile only once they have begun to menstruate and why they cease to do so when pregnant. The menses are quite similar to semen, but rather less well refined or concocted, which makes sense since females are, according to Aristotle, colder than males. Women may have souls, but they also have cold hearts.

  As always Aristotle wants a theory that covers all animals (or at least all blooded animals), but the idea that embryos are made from menses has the obvious weakness that most animals don’t menstruate. Undeterred, Aristotle identifies the blood-like fluid that cows and bitches discharge when they’re in heat as their menses.* Hens, obviously, never discharge anything resembling blood so he points to ‘wind eggs’, the dwarfish, yolkless eggs that they sometimes produce as being a kind of avian menses.* And, although he thinks that most fish eggs are embryos, he acknowledges that some fish are packed with unfertilized roe that is, as it were, their menses. But that’s Aristotle: an answer for everything.

  LXIII

  MALES PRODUCE RATHER little seed; females produce a lot. From this it follows that they have very different genitals. Aristotle, accordingly, has much to say about penises. The seal’s is large; the camel’s is sinewy; the weasel has a bone in his. Two copulatory appendages hang from the cloacae of male, but not female, sharks and rays. He’s uncertain about birds. In The Generation of Animals he says that no bird has a penis, but in Historia animalium he states that the goose does.* He says that snakes don’t have penises; in fact they have two that emerge during sex. He’s vague on the tortoise’s penis, which is very large and stiff.

  He turns to testes. Most live-bearing tetrapods (mammals) have testes suspended from their bellies, but dolphins, hedgehogs and elephants keep theirs inside near their kidneys. The internal testes of birds and egg-laying tetrapods (frogs, lizards, tortoises) are located near their loins. In all of these animals the testes are connected to seminal ducts (urogenital duct/vas deferens) that unite in a common duct. The egg-laying animals (birds, reptiles, amphibians) have a common passage for the faeces, semen and urine (the cloaca), but mammals do not.

  It’s detailed. It’s mostly accurate. It’s very easy to be lulled into complacent familiarity. But then he says something unexpected and you realize, if you did not already, that his notions of how things work are different from ours. Aristotle sees that the testicles have something to do with semen, but not that they make it. Instead, he argues that they store it and regulate its flow. His reasons are characteristically complex.

  Testes, he says, can’t be needed for generation since snakes and fishes don’t have them. They do, however, have semen-filled ‘passages’ which are, then, the equivalent of the seminal ducts of birds and tetrapods, the main semen-receiving organ.* (Since semen is a hyper-refined blood, the product of successive bouts of concoction, if it’s produced anywhere, it’s in the heart, though on this he’s quite vague.) It also follows from this that testes are an optional refinement, structures that some, but not all, animals have for the ‘better’ rather than the ‘necessary’.

  The testes store semen. This is shown by the fact that the testes of some birds (partridges and pigeons) are filled with semen during the breeding season but depleted afterwards. But in tetrapods their function is to regulate its flow. Observing that the seminal ducts (vas deferens) in tetrapods loop up and over the ureters en route to the penis, he argues that this arrangement steadies, or even limits, the seminal flow.* The testes are counterweights that maintain the loop by opposing the natural tendency of the seminal ducts to coil. That’s why, in humans, the testicles descend at puberty and why castrated animals are sterile: lop off the testicles and the seminal ducts spring up into the body cavity and so inhibit the flow.

  The model is strikingly mechanical. He even compares the testes to the stones that weaver-women use to keep the warps of their looms in place. His account of what the penis does is equally odd. He thinks that it gives the semen a final concoction by the heat generated from friction during copulation. Putting it all together, he supposes that semen is concocted in the vascular system, gathered in the seminal ducts and stored in the testes, which also ensure an ejaculate of the right amount; the penis gives it an extra charge and emits into the female genital tract.

  Aristotle’s model of the male reproductive system is a based on a live-bearing tetrapod, probably a bull or ram. He refers to an anatomical diagram of it. His model of the female’s is also based on some ruminant. He calls the whole structure a hystera – ‘uterus’ – and insists that it is always ‘double’ which tells us that his description is based on a ruminant since their uteri are, indeed, mostly made of two large uterine horns which humans lack. The uterine horns – keratia – then unite to form the delphys, which leads to a fleshy, cartilaginous tube with an opening, the mētra. These are probably the uterine body and the cervix. Stretching unity to the limit, Aristotle tries to bring the reproductive systems of female mammals, reptiles, fishes, cephalopods and insects under a common scheme. He finds this hard to do, which is not very surprising, for they are, in fact, very different.

  REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS OF A BLOODED LIVE-BEARING TETRAPOD AFTER HISTORIA ANIMALIUM, BOOK III ABOVE: MALE. BELOW: FEMALE

  LXIV

  BUT ENOUGH OF anatomy. What are Aristotle’s views on the female orgasm?

  He thinks that women want sex – lots of it. Sexual intercourse is ta aphrodisia. He describes highly sexed women as aphrodisiazomenai. Adolescent girls have to be watched since they have a natural impulse to use their developing sexual faculties. They may even contract bad habits (a veiled warning against masturbation?), but usually settle down after having had a few children. Some women are, however, as wanton as mares. Nymphomaniacs are literally ‘stallion-mad’ (hippomanousi).

  The Greeks lacked a technical term for orgasm so Aristotle simply speaks of the ‘pleasure’ or ‘intense pleasure’ of sex. But he certainly thinks that women typically have them; his models of male and female sexuality are very similar. In women ‘the pleasure of intercourse is caused by touch in the same region of the female as the male’ – which suggests that by ‘pleasure’ he means orgasm and by ‘the same region’ he means the glans and the clitoris. True, he has a name for the former, balanos, but not for the latter, but, to give credit where credit is due, he seems to have found it.

  Some women, he says, when experiencing pleasure ‘in a way comparable to a man’, produce a saliva-like fluid which is different from the menstrual fluid. That must be vaginal lubrication. Sometimes there’s a lot of it, more than a man’s emission – apparently a reference to female ejaculation. When women have pleasure, and secrete this sexual fluid, it’s a sign that the uterus is open and conception likely. He says that blondes are especially wet.

  In fact, the question is not whether women experience pleasure during sex, for Aristotle thinks they should and do; rather, it is do they need to climax to conceive?* Aristotle disagrees with himself. In The Generation of Animals he argues that, although a woman usually experiences pleasure during sex, she can conceive without it and, conversely, can fail to conceive even when she ‘keeps the same pace’ as her male partner. The female orgasm is nice but not necessary. In Book X of Historia animalium, however, the orgasm seems much more important, for t
here he argues that during sex the menstrual fluid is secreted into an area ‘in front of the uterus’ (presumably the cervix or vagina), where it mingles with the semen. This secretion apparently happens at orgasm, for both partners have to ‘keep the same pace’ if conception is to be successful. In fact, infertility is usually due to men ‘completing quickly’ while their partners have hardly begun to do so (‘for in most things women are slower’). To determine whether premature ejaculation is indeed the cause of infertility he suggests that the man in question should have intercourse with other women to see if he can generate children – which shows an admirably empirical spirit. To solve the problem of unequal timing he also suggests that the woman should excite herself with ‘appropriate thoughts’ even as her lover dwells on his troubles to cool his ardour.

  It is hard to say whether the ‘orgasm nice’ or ‘orgasm necessary’ theory represents Aristotle’s final thoughts. Book X clearly doesn’t belong with the rest of Historia animalium since its content is mostly clinical; some scholars even doubt that he wrote it. Yet these various theories do share the idea that sex is a collaboration. Both partners are prompted to it for the intense pleasure it gives and, ideally, take their pleasures together; at least they do if they want to conceive a child, and that, for Aristotle, is certainly the point.*

  LXV

  IN THE OPENING LINES of The Generation of Animals Aristotle says that now he wants to investigate the moving cause of life and that ‘To inquire into this and to inquire into the generation of animals is, in a way, the same thing.’ It’s a rather elliptical way of putting it, but he is stating the problem in its most general terms. He believes that the matter from which parents form their progeny – the seed – is only potentially alive. Somehow this matter must be animated. For us this is the problem of fertilization; for Aristotle it is the acquisition of a soul.

  To say that an embryo ‘acquires a soul’ sounds deeply mysterious, but Aristotle just means by it the acquisition of a set of functioning organs. Or, to put it another way, how the embryo gets its form. Plato parked his Forms in the realm beyond the senses; Aristotle places his forms in the seed. An animal gets its soul from its parents. That, however, leaves much to be explained. From which parent does the soul come? Are the sub-souls – nutritive, sensitive, rational – transmitted as a unit? When does the soul actually appear in ontogeny? When does life actually begin?

  Aristotle’s approach to answering these questions is empirical. He observes that, compared to the flow of the menses, ejaculate volume is paltry. So he’s first inclined to think that fathers supply the embryo’s form, and hence its soul, while mothers supply its matter. That’s tantamount to saying that the mother just supplies the building material that the father sculpts into a functioning creature. Indeed, Aristotle often speaks as if this is exactly what he believes. Throughout The Generation of Animals he returns to a set of parallel dichotomies with which he tries to capture the difference between males and females: hot/cold; semen/menses; form/matter; soul/matter; moving cause/material cause; active/passive – the terms vary, but the contrast is always clear.

  Or is it? For all Aristotle’s repeated insistence that males and females make utterly distinct contributions to the embryo, when he turns to the details of embryogenesis and inheritance the roles of males and females begin to blur and merge until finally it is hard to tell them apart. Some scholars argue that The Generation of Animals contains very different, and incompatible, theories, but perhaps we should read these sexual dichotomies as slogans that further analysis will elucidate and refine. For example, having told us that fathers contribute the embryo’s soul, he presents some evidence to show that this is not in fact quite true, and that mothers do, after all, give their offspring life.

  Aristotle claims that hen partridges can ‘conceive’ just by smelling males on the breeze. It sounds absurd, but he really does say it – he says it twice. Partridges aren’t the only birds that produce ‘wind eggs’; all birds do, but they’re particularly common in prolific ones. The business about the breeze isn’t important; the fact that virgin birds produce wind eggs is. Does Aristotle really believe that birds can conceive without impregnation? He does – but the trick is to know what he means by it. For us conception occurs when a sperm fuses with an ovum to make a zygote; for Aristotle conception occurs when semen meets menstrual fluid and makes an egg, but since wind eggs can be produced by virgin hens, menstrual fluid can clearly sometimes congeal spontaneously into a conceptus.* The menses are, then, in some sense alive; they have, in his jargon, the potential for a nutritive soul. Aristotle is clear that wind eggs are duds; full conception, leading to a chick, requires a cock, copulation and semen, but he wonders if even this is true for all animals since he speculates that some fishes may dispense with males. The puzzling thing about the khannos is that you only ever catch females.* Perhaps males don’t exist. Aristotle is, however, reluctant to discard the need for males without more data (‘there haven’t been enough observations’), so sticks with his theory that both seeds contain the potential for a nutritive soul, and that only the semen contains the potential for a sensitive soul and specific form – the features that make, say, a sparrow a sparrow rather than a chicken or a crane.

  Describing how development works, Aristotle leans heavily on his potential/actuality dichotomy: ‘Thus the seed of the hand or face of the whole animal really is the hand or face of a whole animal though in an undifferentiated way; in other words what each of those is in actuality, such the seed is potentially . . .’ This is at once wonderfully insightful and frustratingly opaque. It is insightful for it captures the idea that the seed contains something – the form – that is not the animal itself but that has, nevertheless, the power both to shape and to become it, and that ontogeny is the process by which this potential is translated into an actual living, breathing, copulating creature. But potential-talk can also seem like a feeble substitute for a physical model of development. What, exactly, are these potentials? Point to one. Or, if you can’t do that, at least give us a hint of how they work.

  Aristotle evidently feels this tension too and so does attempt a physical model. He begins by asking whether or not these embryo-forming potentials can be transmitted independently of the physical matter of the semen itself. He invokes one of his favourite analogies: human craft. Consider a carpenter making a bed out of wood. In doing so, he’s not actually contributing matter to the bed, rather the knowledge of his craft (a potential), manifest as a functional movement, shapes matter. Analogously, to contribute a potential, semen need not actually contribute matter to the embryo.

  Besides this analogy Aristotle also provides three lines of zoological evidence. (i) Some insects, he thinks, copulate in a peculiar way: instead of males inserting an organ into females, it’s the other way round.* In such cases, he suggests, the males does not actually transfer any semen, but only a potential. (ii) When a chicken copulates with more than one cock, the chicks may resemble either father – usually the second in line – but never have ‘every part twice’. The thought seems to be that monstrous animals (conjoined twins) might be caused by an excess of seminal material. If so, then you’d expect multiple matings to produce deformed chicks, but they don’t, so it’s not the quantity of seminal material that’s critical, but merely a qualitative ‘potential’.* (iii) When male fish spread their milt on eggs, only the eggs touched by the milt become fertilized. None of these arguments is convincing. Yet Aristotle’s aim is clear: he’s trying to show that the power of semen to direct development rests not on the transmission of seminal matter itself, but on something else.

  What? Something in semen must get to the embryo, and if it isn’t seminal matter then what is it? To solve this problem Aristotle once again invokes that mysterious stuff, pneuma. It’s not only an instrument of the sensitive soul, but also a component of the inheritance system. Aristotle searches semen for the signs of activity. He finds it in the fact that semen resembles foam – or does so immediately after
ejaculation. The foam is due to a charge of pneuma introduced by concoction of the semen during sex. Pneuma does not, however, need to be carried in semen since in those insects with strange sex it gets injected directly into the female. The upshot is a theory for how an animal’s soul is reproduced in the embryo. The structure of the father’s soul is, in effect, encoded in his semen by pneuma-tic action.*

  We must not think of pneuma as the carrier of genetic information itself: it’s not Aristotelian DNA. Rather, Aristotle’s units of inheritance are much more abstract; they’re the movements that pneuma induces in the semen. When he describes the motive principle in semen, the movement that is the future soul incarnate, he chose a word both apt and elegant: aphros or foam; and he meant by this both literally the foam visible in semen, and the foam visible in the wash of waves receding from a shore. Yet, as the passage makes clear, in choosing this word he was also thinking of something else. It is also for aphros, he says, that the Goddess of Love was named.

  APHRODITE

  LXVI

  ARISTOTLE IS GENERALLY credited with being the first scientist to investigate embryogenesis or, to use his words, ‘coming to be’. Was he? The origins of his methods are generally obscure, but a Hippocratic treatise that dates, perhaps, to fifty years before he lived and that was written by, perhaps, Polybus suggests that the foetus of a human being resembles that of a chick. To prove this, says perhaps-Polybus, take twenty eggs, put them under some hens, and open them at daily intervals until they hatch: ‘you will find everything as I say insofar as a bird can resemble a man’. Aristotle doesn’t reference perhaps-Polybus, oddly so, for he had a famously good library and often cites predecessors, admittedly mostly when he thinks they’re wrong.