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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=450300" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Book V - Part 05 - Origins Of Vegetable And Animal Life</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">And now to what remains!- Since I've resolved <br>By what arrangements all things come to pass <br>Through the blue regions of the mighty world,- <br>How we can know what energy and cause <br>Started the various courses of the sun <br>And the moon's goings, and by what far means <br>They can succumb, the while with thwarted light, <br>And veil with shade the unsuspecting lands, <br>When, as it were, they blink, and then again <br>With open eye survey all regions wide, <br>Resplendent with white radiance- I do now <br>Return unto the world's primeval age <br>And tell what first the soft young fields of earth <br>With earliest parturition had decreed <br>To raise in air unto the shores of light <br>And to entrust unto the wayward winds. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the beginning, earth gave forth, around <br>The hills and over all the length of plains, <br>The race of grasses and the shining green; <br>The flowery meadows sparkled all aglow <br>With greening colour, and thereafter, lo, <br>Unto the divers kinds of trees was given <br>An emulous impulse mightily to shoot, <br>With a free rein, aloft into the air. <br>As feathers and hairs and bristles are begot <br>The first on members of the four-foot breeds <br>And on the bodies of the strong-y-winged, <br>Thus then the new Earth first of all put forth <br>Grasses and shrubs, and afterward begat <br>The mortal generations, there upsprung- <br>Innumerable in modes innumerable- <br>After diverging fashions. For from sky <br>These breathing-creatures never can have dropped, <br>Nor the land-dwellers ever have come up <br>Out of sea-pools of salt. How true remains, <br>How merited is that adopted name <br>Of earth- &quot;The Mother!&quot;- since from out the earth <br>Are all begotten. And even now arise <br>From out the loams how many living things- <br>Concreted by the rains and heat of the sun. <br>Wherefore 'tis less a marvel, if they sprang <br>In Long Ago more many, and more big, <br>Matured of those days in the fresh young years <br>Of earth and ether. First of all, the race <br>Of the winged ones and parti-coloured birds, <br>Hatched out in spring-time, left their eggs behind; <br>As now-a-days in summer tree-crickets <br>Do leave their shiny husks of own accord, <br>Seeking their food and living. Then it was <br>This earth of thine first gave unto the day <br>The mortal generations; for prevailed <br>Among the fields abounding hot and wet. <br>And hence, where any fitting spot was given, <br>There 'gan to grow womb-cavities, by roots <br>Affixed to earth. And when in ripened time <br>The age of the young within (that sought the air <br>And fled earth's damps) had burst these wombs, O then <br>Would Nature thither turn the pores of earth <br>And make her spurt from open veins a juice <br>Like unto milk; even as a woman now <br>Is filled, at child-bearing, with the sweet milk, <br>Because all that swift stream of aliment <br>Is thither turned unto the mother-breasts. <br>There earth would furnish to the children food; <br>Warmth was their swaddling cloth, the grass their bed <br>Abounding in soft down. Earth's newness then <br>Would rouse no dour spells of the bitter cold, <br>Nor extreme heats nor winds of mighty powers- <br>For all things grow and gather strength through time <br>In like proportions; and then earth was young. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Wherefore, again, again, how merited <br>Is that adopted name of Earth- The Mother!- <br>Since she herself begat the human race, <br>And at one well-nigh fixed time brought forth <br>Each breast that ranges raving round about <br>Upon the mighty mountains and all birds <br>Aerial with many a varied shape. <br>But, lo, because her bearing years must end, <br>She ceased, like to a woman worn by eld. <br>For lapsing aeons change the nature of <br>The whole wide world, and all things needs must take <br>One status after other, nor aught persists <br>Forever like itself. All things depart; <br>Nature she changeth all, compelleth all <br>To transformation. Lo, this moulders down, <br>A-slack with weary eld, and that, again, <br>Prospers in glory, issuing from contempt. <br>In suchwise, then, the lapsing aeons change <br>The nature of the whole wide world, and earth <br>Taketh one status after other. And what <br>She bore of old, she now can bear no longer, <br>And what she never bore, she can to-day. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">In those days also the telluric world <br>Strove to beget the monsters that upsprung <br>With their astounding visages and limbs- <br>The Man-woman- a thing betwixt the twain, <br>Yet neither, and from either sex remote- <br>Some gruesome Boggles orphaned of the feet, <br>Some widowed of the hands, dumb Horrors too <br>Without a mouth, or blind Ones of no eye, <br>Or Bulks all shackled by their legs and arms <br>Cleaving unto the body fore and aft, <br>Thuswise, that never could they do or go, <br>Nor shun disaster, nor take the good they would. <br>And other prodigies and monsters earth <br>Was then begetting of this sort- in vain, <br>Since Nature banned with horror their increase, <br>And powerless were they to reach unto <br>The coveted flower of fair maturity, <br>Or to find aliment, or to intertwine <br>In works of Venus. For we see there must <br>Concur in life conditions manifold, <br>If life is ever by begetting life <br>To forge the generations one by one: <br>First, foods must be; and, next, a path whereby <br>The seeds of impregnation in the frame <br>May ooze, released from the members all; <br>Last, the possession of those instruments <br>Whereby the male with female can unite, <br>The one with other in mutual ravishments. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And in the ages after monsters died, <br>Perforce there perished many a stock, unable <br>By propagation to forge a progeny. <br>For whatsoever creatures thou beholdest <br>Breathing the breath of life, the same have been <br>Even from their earliest age preserved alive <br>By cunning, or by valour, or at least <br>By speed of foot or wing. And many a stock <br>Remaineth yet, because of use to man, <br>And so committed to man's guardianship. <br>Valour hath saved alive fierce lion-breeds <br>And many another terrorizing race, <br>Cunning the foxes, flight the antlered stags. <br>Light-sleeping dogs with faithful heart in breast, <br>However, and every kind begot from seed <br>Of beasts of draft, as, too, the woolly flocks <br>And horned cattle, all, my Memmius, <br>Have been committed to guardianship of men. <br>For anxiously they fled the savage beasts, <br>And peace they sought and their abundant foods, <br>Obtained with never labours of their own, <br>Which we secure to them as fit rewards <br>For their good service. But those beasts to whom <br>Nature has granted naught of these same things- <br>Beasts quite unfit by own free will to thrive <br>And vain for any service unto us <br>In thanks for which we should permit their kind <br>To feed and be in our protection safe- <br>Those, of a truth, were wont to be exposed, <br>Enshackled in the gruesome bonds of doom, <br>As prey and booty for the rest, until <br>Nature reduced that stock to utter death. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">But Centaurs ne'er have been, nor can there be <br>Creatures of twofold stock and double frame, <br>Compact of members alien in kind, <br>Yet formed with equal function, equal force <br>In every bodily part- a fact thou mayst, <br>However dull thy wits, well learn from this: <br>The horse, when his three years have rolled away, <br>Flowers in his prime of vigour; but the boy <br>Not so, for oft even then he gropes in sleep <br>After the milky nipples of the breasts, <br>An infant still. And later, when at last <br>The lusty powers of horses and stout limbs, <br>Now weak through lapsing life, do fail with age, <br>Lo, only then doth youth with flowering years <br>Begin for boys, and clothe their ruddy cheeks <br>With the soft down. So never deem, percase, <br>That from a man and from the seed of horse, <br>The beast of draft, can Centaurs be composed <br>Or e'er exist alive, nor Scyllas be- <br>The half-fish bodies girdled with mad dogs- <br>Nor others of this sort, in whom we mark <br>Members discordant each with each; for ne'er <br>At one same time they reach their flower of age <br>Or gain and lose full vigour of their frame, <br>And never burn with one same lust of love, <br>And never in their habits they agree, <br>Nor find the same foods equally delightsome- <br>Sooth, as one oft may see the bearded goats <br>Batten upon the hemlock which to man <br>Is violent poison. Once again, since flame <br>Is wont to scorch and burn the tawny bulks <br>Of the great lions as much as other kinds <br>Of flesh and blood existing in the lands, <br>How could it be that she, Chimaera lone, <br>With triple body- fore, a lion she; <br>And aft, a dragon; and betwixt, a goat- <br>Might at the mouth from out the body belch <br>Infuriate flame? Wherefore, the man who feigns <br>Such beings could have been engendered <br>When earth was new and the young sky was fresh <br>(Basing his empty argument on new) <br>May babble with like reason many whims <br>Into our ears: he'll say, perhaps, that then <br>Rivers of gold through every landscape flowed, <br>That trees were wont with precious stones to flower, <br>Or that in those far aeons man was born <br>With such gigantic length and lift of limbs <br>As to be able, based upon his feet, <br>Deep oceans to bestride; or with his hands <br>To whirl the firmament around his head. <br>For though in earth were many seeds of things <br>In the old time when this telluric world <br>First poured the breeds of animals abroad, <br>Still that is nothing of a sign that then <br>Such hybrid creatures could have been begot <br>And limbs of all beasts heterogeneous <br>Have been together knit; because, indeed, <br>The divers kinds of grasses and the grains <br>And the delightsome trees- which even now <br>Spring up abounding from within the earth- <br>Can still ne'er be begotten with their stems <br>Begrafted into one; but each sole thing <br>Proceeds according to its proper wont <br>And all conserve their own distinctions based <br>In Nature's fixed decree.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Lucretius">Lucretius</a><div class=q>
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By what arrangements all things come to pass 
Through the blue regions of the mighty world,- 
How we can know what energy and cause 
Started the various courses of the sun 
And the moon's goings, and ..."></div>
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