236 



The Journal of Heredity 



Darwin's Origin of Species was pub- 

 lished, speeulation far outran fact, and 

 the development of the idea was at times 

 arrested and even retrogressive. The 

 Law of Evolution was reached not by 

 any decided leap, but by the progressive 

 development of every subordinate idea 

 connected with it, until it was recog- 

 nized as a w^hole by Lamarck, or later 

 by Darwin." 



Many evolutionary ideas trace back 

 to Greek natural history literature, 

 which from beginning to end is a con- 

 tinuous source of pleasure and surprise. 

 Amid wide differences of opinion as to 

 how^ far the Greeks actually anticipated 

 later discoveries, the true conclusion is 

 that they anticipated many of our 

 modern theories by suggestion; thus 

 they carried the idea of evolution well 

 into its suggestive stage, which was so 

 much ground gained for those who took 

 it up in Europe. Greek speculations 

 greatly hastened the final result, al- 

 though judged by modern scientific 

 standards they arose mainly as a series 

 of happy conjectures. 



As early as six himdred years before 

 Christ, Anaximander wrote that the 

 earth was. at first, a fluid. Gradually 

 this f^uid began to dry and grow thicker, 

 and here and there dry land appeared. 

 When this dry land had become firm 

 enough to serve as his home, man came 

 up from the water in the form of a fish. 

 Slowly and gradually the fishes, strug- 

 ghng about on the land, gained for them- 

 selves the limbs and organs they needed 

 for their new situation, and their devel- 

 opment into men. 



After them, other animals came uj) 

 in much the same way, then the ])lants, 

 until the whole world was clothed with 

 its present inhabitants. 



THE GENETICS OF EMPEDOCLES. 



Empedocles, a century and a half 

 later, added a new thought. He said 

 that in the beginning there were all 

 sorts of strange, incomplete, and mis- 

 jointed monsters which swarmed upon 

 the earth, having sprung up and out of 

 the earth itself. Each was a cha(js of 

 limbs which were to belong afterward to 

 other animals which needed them more. 

 An interchanging came aljout slowly and 

 gradually by which appropriate limbs 



fastened themselves to the proper ani- 

 mals. The last of these mis ointcd 

 creatures is the one known as the 

 centaur, half man, half horse. After a 

 while, when all of the members had 

 found their proper places, the animals 

 were complete. 



Later came Anaxagoras, w-ho was the 

 first to believe that there was intelligent 

 design back of the creation of animals 

 and plants. He believed there had 

 originally been a slime in which there 

 was mixed, in a chaos, the germs of 

 all the later plants, animals and min- 

 erals. Out of this mixture, order slowly 

 arose by the minerals settling first, 

 forming the earth, with the air floating 

 over it and the ether above. The germs 

 of plants settled out of the air upon the 

 earth and vegetation covered the min- 

 eral floor. From the ether came the 

 germs of animals and men. 



The greatest scientific thinker of 

 early Greece was Aristotle. He had 

 spent his life by the seashore and knew 

 better than any other man of his time 

 the exquisite seaweeds and still more 

 beautiful marine animals. He was the 

 first to think of them as a related series, 

 the higher developing out of the low^er 

 under the pressure of what is called a 

 perfecting principle. Out of the inani- 

 mate rocks had sprung the marine 

 plants — the seaweeds. From these had 

 developed first "plant animals" like the 

 sea-anemones and the sponges. These 

 grew attached to the rocks, as plants 

 do. With higher development came 

 locomotion with ever increasing energy. 

 At last man arose, the Crown of all 

 Creation. 



During the long middle ages, the 

 evolutionary idea made no advance. 

 Finally it l)egan to retrogress, when 

 Greek natural philoso])h\- shared in the 

 general sui^prcssion of the rationalistic 

 movement of thought of Arabic origin. 

 Later the hard and fast conceptions and 

 definitions of species developed in the 

 rapid rise of systematic botany and 

 zoology, and were grafted upon the 

 Mosaic account of the Creation, estab- 

 lishing a Special Creation theory for 

 the origin of each si)ecies. Later still, 

 when it was discovered in ])ale()ntology 

 that s])eeies of difTerent kinds had suc- 

 ceeded each ollu-r in time, the "s])eciar' 



