ANAXIMANDER. 705 



human foetuses grew in these animals to a state of puberty, so that when at 

 length they burst, men and women capable of nourishing themselves proceeded 

 from them. 



It will observed that the first four passages stand in substantial 

 agreement with one another, as might be expected from having all been 

 derived from a single source. This work of Theophrastus contained, 

 no doubt, an accurate transcript of the doctrines of Anaximander, since 

 in one instance his very words appear to have been quoted; and as the 

 works of the latter are known to have been in the hands of Apollodorus, 

 there is every reason to suppose that Theophrastus wrote with them 

 lying open before him. When we come to Censorinus, however, we meet 

 with such an absurd and strikingly different version as to leave little 

 doubt that it rests upon a faulty translation of the Greek texts; yet we 

 shall see presently that the majority of modern writers regard this 

 as a faithful rendering of the Milesian's views. 



As early as 1819, Heinrich Eitter, to whom we owe the first satis- 

 factory collation of pre-Socratic texts, interpreted Anaximander as hav- 

 ing taught that ' after the first imperfect and short-lived creatures had 

 been engendered in slime, an advance took place from the lower to the 

 higher grades of life, until at length man was formed.' Cuvier, whose 

 accuracy and erudition have seldom been called in question, went so 

 far as to attribute to our philosopher the belief that men had been first 

 fish, then reptiles, then mammals, and lastly what they now are. ' This 

 system/ he further remarks, ' we find reproduced in times very near 

 to our own, and even in the nineteenth century.' More conservative 

 is the estimate of Sir Charles Lyell, who while admitting that our 

 philosopher ' made at least some slight approach, twenty-five centuries 

 before our time, to the modern doctrine of evolution,' yet denies that 

 he anticipated the Lamarckian theory of progressive development.* 



Edward Zeller, than whom is no more competent authority, speaks 

 in following wise of Anaximander's evolutionary ideas : " The ani- 

 mals, also, he thought, originated from primitive slime, under the in- 

 fluence of the sun's heat; and as the idea of a gradual succession of 

 animal species corresponding with the periods of geological formation 

 was naturally beyond his reach, he assumed that the land animals, 

 including man, had been at first fishes, and afterwards, when they 

 were able to develop themselves under their new shape, had come on 

 shore and thrown off their scales."! Professor Osborn gives practically 

 the same resume as Zeller, adding, however, that we find in these frag- 

 ments the ' dim notion of survival or persistence throughout decidedly 

 trying circumstances, which was greatly developed later by Empedocles.' 

 He is unwilling to grant that Anaximander attempted to account for 

 the origin of other land animals, or had any notion of the development 

 of higher from lower organisms, except in the case of man. 



* ' Principles of Geology,' Vol. I., Chap. II. 



f History of Greek Philosophy,' Vol. I., p. 255 (London, 1881). 



