CHAPTER XI.

Children are very subject to spasms, and especially those that are in a good condition and have abundance of rich milk, or whose nurses are fat. Wine is injurious in this complaint, and dark-coloured wines more so than those that are pale, and food that is not fluid, and windy aliments, and stoppage in the bowels. Children with this complaint generally die before the seventh day: wherefore also this day has received a name, as if it gave some hope of the recovery of the child. Children suffer most at the full moon. Children are in great danger when the spasms originate in the back, especially if they are advancing in age.[215]

[215] The seventh book ends very abruptly, and hence it has been thought that what is now called the tenth book, in which the subject of reproduction is continued, would have its proper place here, as a continuation of the seventh. Whether a portion of the genuine work of Aristotle has been lost which would have completed the subject is another question; but there can be little doubt that the tenth book, in the form in which we have it, is no genuine work of Aristotle; some of the opinions are contrary to those which he has expressed, and the whole style and language is different from that of Aristotle. Schneider therefore has placed the tenth book at the end of the work, that he may neither entirely exclude that which in former times was considered a portion of Aristotle's treatise on Animals, nor yet allow a fictitious book to interrupt the genuine writings of his Author.

BOOK THE EIGHTH.