Note 58 — GREEK BIOLOGY

Historia animalium, v. 6; 541ᵇ 1. The hectocotylization of the cephalopod arm which is here recorded as an element in the reproductive process of these animals is denied in the De generatione animalium, i. 15; 720ᵇ 32, where we read that ‘the insertion of the arm of the male into the funnel of the female ... is only for the sake of attachment, and it is not an organ useful for generation, for it is outside the passage in the male and indeed outside the body of the male altogether.‘ Yet even here Aristotle knows of the physical relationship of the arm. See note on this point in the translation of the passage by A. Platt, Oxford, 1910.