previous next

CHAP. 92. (39.)—WHETHER THE BLOOD IS THE PRINCIPLE OF LIFE.

There are some persons who are of opinion that the fineness of the wit does not depend upon the thinness of the blood, but that animals are more or less stupid in proportion to the skin or other coverings of the body, as the oyster and the tortoise, for instance: that the hide of the ox and the bristles of the hog, in fact, offer a resistance to the fine and penetrating powers of the air, and leave no passage for its transmission in a pure and liquid state. The same, they say, is the case, too, with men, when the skin is very thick or callous, and so excludes the air. Just as if, indeed, the crocodile was not equally remarkable for the hardness of its skin and its extreme cunning.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Latin (Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff, 1906)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide References (6 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: