16 THE COMING [CH. 



it might have been similarly produced through the 

 slow and constant action of the causes now seen in 

 operation around them. This idea was incorporated 

 in a myth, which was suggested by the slow and 

 gradual transformation of an egg into a perfect, 

 growing organism. The birth of the world was 

 pictured as an act of incubation, and male and female 

 deities were invented to play the part of parents to 

 the infant world. By Pythagoras, who resided for 

 more than twenty years in Egypt, these ideas were 

 introduced to the Greek philosophers, and from that 

 time 'Catastrophism' found a rival in the new 

 doctrine which we shall see has been designated under 

 the names of ' Continuity/ ' Uniformitarianism ' or 

 ' Evolution/ How, from the first crude notions of 

 evolution, successive thinkers developed more just and 

 noble conceptions on the subject, has been admirably 

 shown by Professor Osborn in his From the Greeks to 

 Darwin and by Mr Clodd in his Pioneers of Evolution. 

 Poets, from Empedocles and Lucretius to Goethe 

 and Tennyson, have sought in their verses to illustrate 

 the beauty of evolutionary ideas ; and philosophers, 

 from Aristotle and Strabo to Kant and Herbert 

 Spencer, have recognised the principle of evolution 

 as harmonising with, and growing out of, the highest 

 conceptions of science. Yet it was not till the Nine- 

 teenth Century that any serious attempts were made 

 to establish the hypothesis of evolution as a definite 



