CATALYSIS AS THE EFFICIENT CAUSE OF EVOLUTION 247 



Since what Osborn terms "natural causes" commonly operate 

 under the laws of chance, there seems no experimental method of 

 differentiating between the second and the third of the three 

 causation forms he mentions, though many feel compelled by the 

 wonders of natural phenomena as revealed by science, to believe 

 in and admit the existence of something beyond human under- 

 standing. Apart from such metaphysical considerations, modern 

 science tries to explain the causes of phenomena on the basis of the 

 behavior of material units at various stages of structure or organ- 

 ization. This is real dialectic materialism, and is in itself most 

 wonderful and interesting. 



The materialistic political expansion of Rome left little room 

 for scientific advance. According to Gibbon, the Roman Em- 

 peror Tiberius, on being shown a specimen of "unbreakable" 

 glass, sent the inventor to immediate execution because the im- 

 perial coffers received taxes on glass. 2 The fall of Rome and the 

 establishment of the Church as a factor dominating medieval 

 thought reduced science largely to ecclesiastical quibbling under 

 the fiat that the divine mind guided every detail in nature, a 

 concept allied to the Mohammedan view: "It is the will of Allah." 



The development of the Renaissance began to liberate science. 

 Roger Bacon (c. 12 14-1 294), the clear-thinking Franciscan who 

 studied Arabic lore and dabbled with gunpowder, was imprisoned 

 for 14 years. The protean Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), known 

 to most for the great artist that he was, prided himself most on 

 being an engineer, studied the flight of birds and sketched a flying 

 machine. He also made keen anatomical and physiological ob- 

 servations and experiments, and pointed to the fossil shells found 

 on mountains as evidence that those areas were once covered by 

 the sea. His remarkable records, kept in "mirror writing," have 

 only recently been published in part. Giordano Bruno (1549- 

 1600) was burned at the stake as a heretic. But the world con- 

 tinued to move. 



With the classification ("Systema Naturae") of plants and ani- 

 mals by the Swedish professor Carl von Linne (1707-1778), com- 

 monly known as Linnaeus, we begin to approach modern times. 

 Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), who founded the sciences of paleon- 

 tology and comparative anatomy, believed with Linnaeus that 

 species were fixed by special divine creation, and so great was 

 Cuvier's influence supported by that of Buffon (1707-1788), that 

 when Jean Lamarck (1744-1829) advanced the view that there is a 



