第33章

The next question to be mooted concerns the nature of semen.For whereas when it issues from the animal it is thick and white, yet on cooling it becomes liquid as water, and its colour is that of water.

This would appear strange, for water is not thickened by heat; yet semen is thick when it issues from within the animal's body which is hot, and becomes liquid on cooling.Again, watery fluids freeze, but semen, if exposed in frosts to the open air, does not freeze but liquefies, as if it was thickened by the opposite of cold.Yet it is unreasonable, again, to suppose that it is thickened by heat.For it is only substances having a predominance of earth in their composition that coagulate and thicken on boiling, e.g.milk.It ought then to solidify on cooling, but as a matter of fact it does not become solid in any part but the whole of it goes like water.

This then is the difficulty.If it is water, water evidently does not thicken through heat, whereas the semen is thick and both it and the body whence it issues are hot.If it is made of earth or a mixture of earth and water, it ought not to liquefy entirely and turn to water.

Perhaps, however, we have not discriminated all the possibilities.

It is not only the liquids composed of water and earthy matter that thicken, but also those composed of water and air; foam, for instance, becomes thicker and white, and the smaller and less visible the bubbles in it, the whiter and firmer does the mass appear.The same thing happens also with oil; on mixing with air it thickens, wherefore that which is whitening becomes thicker, the watery part in it being separated off by the heat and turning to air.And if oxide of lead is mixed with water or even with oil, the mass increases greatly and changes from liquid and dark to firm and white, the reason being that air is mixed in with it which increases the mass and makes the white shine through, as in foam and snow (for snow is foam).And water itself on mingling with oil becomes thick and white, because air is entangled in it by the act of pounding them together, and oil itself has much air in it (for shininess is a property of air, not of earth or water).This too is why it floats on the surface of the water, for the air contained in it as in a vessel bears it up and makes it float, being the cause of its lightness.So too oil is thickened without freezing in cold weather and frosts; it does not freeze because of its heat (for the air is hot and will not freeze), but because the air is forced together and compressed, as..., by the cold, the oil becomes thicker.These are the reasons why semen is firm and white when it issues from within the animal; it has a quantity of hot air in it because of the internal heat; afterwards, when the heat has evaporated and the air has cooled, it turns liquid and dark; for the water, and any small quantity of earthy matter there may be, remain in semen as it dries, as they do in phlegm.

Semen, then, is a compound of spirit (pneuma) and water, and the former is hot air (aerh); hence semen is liquid in its nature because it is made of water.What Ctesias the Cnidian has asserted of the semen of elephants is manifestly untrue; he says that it hardens so much in drying that it becomes like amber.But this does not happen, though it is true that one semen must be more earthy than another, and especially so with animals that have much earthy matter in them because of the bulk of their bodies.And it is thick and white because it is mixed with spirit, for it is also an invariable rule that it is white, and Herodotus does not report the truth when he says that the semen of the Aethiopians is black, as if everything must needs be black in those who have a black skin, and that too when he saw their teeth were white.The reason of the whiteness of semen is that it is a foam, and foam is white, especially that which is composed of the smallest parts, small in the sense that each bubble is invisible, which is what happens when water and oil are mixed and shaken together, as said before.(Even the ancients seem to have noticed that semen is of the nature of foam; at least it was from this they named the goddess who presides over union.)This then is the explanation of the problem proposed, and it is plain too that this is why semen does not freeze; for air will not freeze.