ARS PARVA. original: "The Little Art" (referring to a short treatise or compendium)

...it is gifted with the power of growth: its movement is more perfect, more distinct, and as the Greeks interpret it, poikilōteros more varied/intricate. Contained within vegetation are attraction, retention, digestion, assimilation, and other movements of this vegetative faculty of its kind, which we call natural actions: regarding which Galen Claudius Galenus, 2nd-century Greek physician and philosopher wrote most extensively in his book *On the Natural Faculties*.

By the same reasoning, the form of multiform things (which we previously said are called heterogeneis heterogeneous/of different kinds by the Greeks, that is, those which are not generated solely from the elements, but from natures mixed from the elements) is more distinct and perfect. And the better these very things have been tempered, and the more elaborately they have been mixed by nature, the more distinct and perfect a form of composition they possess; consequently, they have more numerous and perfect movements. For plants precede the elements in perfection and number of actions; animals, however, precede plants; and man indeed precedes all these, since he is the most tempered and most elaborate of all things that have been generated in this world, and as it were, the most absolute and most perfect work of nature. The end The telos or final cause is that for whose sake something is done: for instance, a muscle for the sake of movement. The end, however, is the first of all causes, and also the last. It is the first, indeed, because in all things that happen, we consider this first and conceive it in our minds. It is the last, however, because it occurs last.