PALAEONTOLOGY AND GEOLOGY 



real animals any belief that an evolution from pre- 

 historic forms had occurred. His sequence of creation 

 of plants, water animals, land animals, and man, un- 

 doubtedly refers to the creation of organisms known 

 to him as then existing. 



The fact that even two unequivocal references to 

 the variability of the proportions of sea and land, and 

 to the presence of fossil shells have escaped the acci- 

 dents of time is significant that those were probably 

 live and discussed questions of importance. With 

 Aristotle, we can pass from tradition to an authentic 

 statement. In his treatise 0?i Meteors he argued: 

 "Not always are the same places of the earth sub- 

 merged under water nor always dry, but they change 

 with the floods and failures of the rivers. Wherefore 

 also the continents change as do the seas; these places 

 do not remain land for all time, and those places sea, 

 but sea becomes where there is dry land, and where 

 now there is sea, again land becomes. We must also 

 remember that these things come to pass in a certain 

 order and period."*^ But Aristotle placed but little 

 importance on the fact of the variability of the earth's 

 surface and accounted for it mostly by the variation 

 in rainfall in the different seasons. What he was in- 

 terested in was the, to him, far more important meta- 

 physical question whether the world had, or had not, 

 a beginning and what bearing variability of the 



^ Meteors, Book I, chap. xiv. 



C 123 3 



