7o6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Theodore Gomperz, in his work on ' Greek Thinkers/ suggests sev- 

 eral influences which may have given definiteness to Anaximander's 

 speculations. For instance, the theory that the first animals were 

 generated in sea-slime is traceable as far back as the Homeric poems, 

 in which water and earth were supposed to be the elements of all 

 organic bodies ; and this presumption, the author remarks, ' may have 

 been strengthened by the wealth of all kinds of life contained in the 

 sea, not to mention the discovery of the remains of prehistoric marine 

 monsters.'* As for the casting by primeval animals of their bristly 

 integuments, the same writer observes : " It is likely enough that the 

 analogous change sustained by some insect larvse may have led him to 

 this hypothesis. We can hardly doubt that he traced the forefathers 

 of the terrestrial fauna from the descendants of these marine animals, 

 thus obtaining a first vague glimpse of the modern theory of evolution." 

 Another ingenious suggestion is that Anaximander, in seeking to ex- 

 plain the origin of human species, drew his analogy from the shark, 

 which ' was popularly believed to swallow her young when they crept 

 out of their capsules, to vomit them forth and swallow them again, and 

 go on repeating the process till the young animal was strong enough to 

 support an independent existence.' 



Comment upon the various estimates here brought together ap- 

 pears unnecessary. It is enough that they all present Anaximander 

 to us as a keen and deeply contemplative student of nature, who arrived 

 at a dim adumbration of great truths. Evolutionist or not, as one 

 will, the fact remains that his teachings contain germs of suggestion 

 having high potentiality, which developed in the fulness of time into 

 definite conceptions of organic, and even universal evolution. It is 

 worth while for us to know that hints occur, in that far-off period, 

 of theories of the survival of the fittest, of adaptation to environment, 

 even of evolution as an explanation of the origin of all forms of life. 

 That they remained only hints was inevitable without a knowledge of 

 the essential facts of paleontology. Yet, after all is said, we must 

 grant it was no small thing for Ionic genius to have given the first 

 impulse to lines of thought which have profoundly influenced all de- 

 partments of human understanding. Nor is it a small thing to realize 

 that our questionings of nature, and indeed our very conceptions of 

 life, re-echo at this day in surprisingly similar manner the questionings 

 and conceptions that occupied the Hellenic mind more than twenty-five 

 centuries ago. As intellectual pioneers, we owe them reverence for 

 having first blazed the way along which all modern thought has 

 followed. 



* Numbers of such discoveries are mentioned in pagan literature, some of 

 the remains being interpreted as ' bones of giants,' others as belonging to ' sea 

 monsters.' As late as the second century of our era, Pausanias, who seems 

 to have had a veritable passion for natural curiosities of all sorts, records 

 having seen huge bones in various parts of Greece. Near Megalopolis, where 

 he observed some of them, remains of mammoths and other large extinct animals 

 have been found plentifully in modern times. 



