Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 5.11 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 5.11 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

WHENCE IT IS THAT CHILDREN REPRESENT THEIR PARENTS AND PROGENITORS. Empedocles says, that the similitude of children to their parents proceeds from the vigorous prevalency of the generating sperm ; the dissimilitude from the evaporation of the natural heat contained in the same. Parmenides, that Avhen the sperm descends from the right side of the womb, then the infant gives the resemblance of the father ; if from the left, it is stamped with the similitude of the mother. The Stoics, that the whole body and soul give the sperm ; and hence arise the resemblances in the characters and figures of the children, as a painter in his copy imitates the colors which are in the picture before him. Women have a concurrent emission of seed ; if the feminine seed have the predominancy, then the child resembles the mother ; if the masculine, the father.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch — translated by John Dowel (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)