De causis curatricibus Theses Progymnasticae

...preserves itself: all vegetables (that is, herbs, shrubs, and trees), as soon as they have sprouted, not only strive to increase and perfect themselves continuously, but also strive to preserve themselves once increased and perfected. For they evidently draw to themselves familiar, convenient, and healthy nourishment from the earth, retain it, digest it, and extrude from themselves what is excrementitious and foreign. Whence (for example) in trees, the bark, gums, down, and tubers or fungi and the like are produced. Moreover, if they receive any wound from external injury (provided it is not excessively severe), they repair, restore, and reinstate themselves, and thus maintain their health and safety whole to the end.

IX.
But you may see these same works performed far more absolutely in animals. Indeed, in the principles of their generation, while they are formed in the maternal womb, they are nourished and grow by their own will. No less do they exercise these same actions evidently of themselves once they have been brought into the light, and they perceive and move from place to place by their own proper faculty and without external aids. Indeed, they do so far more skillfully.

X.
For also, during the rest of their life, they eject what is useless and superfluous from the ingested food, which would be a nuisance and a burden to them, through designated passages. They also heal themselves of diseases and find remedies most skillfully. They likewise heal and consolidate wounds and fractures of bones without any external aid. Examples are everywhere obvious, not only in certain animals (such as in the Egyptian Ibis, the Hippopotamus, stags, swallows, dogs, and the like), but in almost all: although more in one, less in another.

XI.
If all these things are found in substances endowed with a more imperfect soul (namely, in brutes and plants, in which Aristotle pronounces only a part of the soul to exist), it is consistent that they occur much more excellently and perfectly in man, since he excels all sublunary creatures in the perfection of his composition.

XII.
And these things happen with such conspicuous signs that he must be considered clearly blind and stupid who does not clearly notice them and, as it were, feel them with his own senses every day, so far is it from being necessary to search for them with laborious investigation.

XIII.
Indeed, to repeat from a little higher up, from the first origin of a nascent man: as soon as the seeds of the parents have coalesced with each other in familiar union, and have been warmed by the gentle heat of the womb, then that genital matter or mass, which appeared to be formless and dead, is soon changed into another face, as it were, and is spontaneously excited, moved, and lives.

XIV.
For it first boils and swells with a certain intrinsic spirit and heat,

then