Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 5.14 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 5.14 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

HOW IT COMES TO PASS THAT MULES ARE BARREN. Alcmaeon says, that the barrenness of the male mules ariseth from the thinness of the genital sperm, that is, the seed is too chill ; the female mules are barren, for their womb does not open its mouth (as he expresses it). Empedocles, the matrix of the mule is so small, so depressed, so narrow, so invertedly growing to the belly, that the sperm cannot be regularly cast into it, and if it could, there would be no capacity to receive it. Diodes concurs in this opinion with him ; for, saith he, in our anatomical dissection of mules we have seen that their matrices are of such configurations ; and it is possible that there may be the same reason why some women are barren.

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)