34
With regard to serpents or snakes, the viper is externally
viviparous, having been previously oviparous internally. The egg, as
with the egg of fishes, is uniform in colour and soft-skinned. The
young serpent grows on the surface of the egg, and, like the young
of fishes, has no shell-like envelopment. The young of the viper is
born inside a membrane that bursts from off the young creature in
three days; and at times the young viper eats its way out from the
inside of the egg. The mother viper brings forth all its young in
one day, twenty in number, and one at a time. The other serpents are
externally oviparous, and their eggs are strung on to one another like
a lady's necklace; after the dam has laid her eggs in the ground she
broods over them, and hatches the eggs in the following year.
Book VI
1
So much for the generative processes in snakes and insects, and
also in oviparous quadrupeds. Birds without exception lay eggs, but
the pairing season and the times of parturition are not alike for all.
Some birds couple and lay at almost any time in the year, as for
instance the barn-door hen and the pigeon: the former of these
coupling and laying during the entire year, with the exception of
the month before and the month after the winter solstice.
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