GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE since they were unable to penetrate therein and to reach and handle all portions of the material. It is not so, however, with Nature. Every part of a bone she makes bone, every part of the flesh she makes flesh, and so with fat and all the rest; there is no part which she has not touched, elaborated, and embellished. Phidias, on the other hand, could not turn wax into ivory and gold, nor yet gold into wax: for each of these remains as it was at the commencement and becomes a perfect statue simply by being clothed externally in a form and artificial shape. But Nature does not pre- serve the original character of any kind of matter; if she did so, then all parts of the animal would be blood, — that blood, namely, which flows to the semen from the impregnated female, and which is, so to speak, like the statuary's wax, a single uniform matter, sub- jected to the artificer. From this there arises no part of the animal which is as red and moist [as blood is], for bone, artery, vein, nerve, cartilage, fat, gland, membrane, and marrow are not blood, though they arise from it." These passages are from the opening chap- ters of the second book. The last part of the first book and the remainder of book two
[ii8]
[118]
