172 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



These citations of the evolution idea in Lucretius are a sufficient 

 refutation of the popuhir notion that somehow Darwin is responsible 

 for the invention of this revolutionary conception. Indeed, the doc- 

 trine of evolution is itself one of the best illustrations of the law of 

 evolution, for it has a continuous, progressive history of twenty-five 

 centuries. It stretches the slow process of its rise and development 

 from Thales' 'evolution's morning star,' more than six hundred years 

 before Christ, down to the present hour. The hazy surmises of the 

 early Greek speculation become precise and organic in the teaching of 

 Aristotle, that nature proceeds by gradual transitions from the most 

 imperfect to the most perfect, that the higher species are descended 

 from the lower, that man is the highest point of a long and continuous 

 ascent. The idea thus definitely enunciated by 'the master of those 

 that know,' may be traced through Lucretius to the Christian theo- 

 logians of the medieval period, and from them to the philosophers and 

 naturalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century we meet Lamarck, the most im- 

 portant figure in this history since Aristotle. His 'Zoological Philos- 

 ophy' (1809) is the first elaborate exposition of the means or factors 

 of evolution as applied to the origin of living forms. From his day the 

 descent of the higher organisms from the lower was a standing ques- 

 tion among naturalists until the publication of Charles Darwin's 

 'Origin of Species' in 1859. That splendid product of a great mind 

 brooding for years on an enormous mass of facts, practically closed the 

 question and won at once the almost unanimous assent of the naturalists 

 of the world. 



Our old-world poet not only takes an honorable place in the his- 

 torical development of scientific opinion, but also illustrates in his own 

 person certain modern phases of the relation between science and relig- 

 ion. He has been called the high-priest of atheism and the apostle of 

 irreligion. He does deny Providence and the future life with great 

 elaboration of argimient; he does scout with vehemence the current 

 theology and worship. And this, too, in the name of his scientific sys- 

 tem. But was his science atheistic and irreligious? His fierce indigna- 

 tion — does it burn against the gods themselves, or against the popular 

 conception of the gods? Does he despise religion itself, or the 'foul' 

 perversion of it ? 



Eespecting Lucretius' opposition, in the name of science, to religion, 

 it is to be borne in mind that, speaking generally, the Eomans had no 

 genius for religion. They were called unto politics, as the Hebrews 

 were called unto religion. The national religion derived what vitality 

 it had from its alliance with the civic spirit, and with the decline of 

 that spirit, religion dropped into cant with a meager and barren ritual 

 and a train of grotesque superstitions. It was at times polluted by 



