be ae ws 
17 
destroyed by water or by fire, and renovated. Now, as they predicted 
eclipses, and correctly explained many astronomical phenomena, we must 
infer that much of their science was the result of reasoning founded upon 
observation, and when we find Heropotus, when collecting his travellers’ 
tales, noting the occurrence of shells in and around Egypt, and explaining 
it by the supposition that the district had once been below the sea, we may 
safely infer that the still earlier speculations as to the destruction by water, 
of what was to them the whole earth, was founded upon similar observa- 
tions. In the life-time of one man a great devastating deluge has been 
spoken of as the flood. How much more, after the story has been handed 
on through many generations of illiterate men, would it be exaggerated, and 
then connected with the shells found in the rocks and hills around, be 
measured by the submergence necessary to leave them there, and finally be 
exaggerated into the world-wide devastation of the Hindoo or Egyptian ? 
I saw in a recent periodical an amusing instance of how such traditions 
might begin :— 
‘*The inundation of 1771 swept away the greater part of the old Tyne Bridge, 
Newcastle, and was long remembered and alluded to with emphasis as ‘the 
flood.’ On one occasion Mr. Adam Thompson was put into the witness box at 
the Assizes. The Counsel, asking his name, received the answer, ‘Adam, Sir ; 
Adam Thompson.’ ‘ Where do you live? ‘At Paradise, Sir’ (Paradise is a 
village about a mile-and-a-half west of Newcastle.) ‘And hdw long have you 
dwelt in Paradise?’ ‘ Ever since the flood,’ was the answer, made in all simpli- 
city, and with no intention to raise a laugh. It is needless to say that the 
Judge had to ask for an explanation.”—( British Workman, Dec., 1875. ) 
The Greeks* do not seem to have helped our science on much; ANAXI- 
MANDER made some curious guesses in biology, almost anticipating the 
modern theory, but, as far as can be gathered from the scraps of his 
writings handed down to us, they seem to be inferences from the helpless- 
ness of the human infant, rather than results of observations on changes of 
form in embryos or varieties on species. 
PyvrHacoras, whether justly or not we cannot say, gets credit for a most 
remarkable series of observations and inferences recorded by Ovip. The 
sum and substance of it all is, that the land has often gone down below 
the sea, and the sea bottom has often been lifted up into the land. 
ARISTOTLE pointed out the changes going on now in a way that shows that 
he at any rate.thought that, given time enough, many of the great and 
puzzling phenomena of change of sea and land, and buried petrified fish, and 
so on, would be explained. The Stoics borrowed from the Egyptians some 
notions about monsters which once existed, but otherwise the idea of a 
succession of distinct forms of life does not seem to have occurred to the 
ancients. As there isa difficulty in speaking of Greek contributions to 
Natural Science, because most of what they have recorded may be only 
what they learnt from the Egyptians, whose treatises on the subject are 
lost, so we have still greater difficulty in assigning to the Romans their 
share of original work. Srraxo, for instance, discusses at large the views 
of various Greek authors; Piiny seems to have set to work the right way, 
and collected facts wherever he could, but did not show any great skill in 
generalizing upon them. Arabian writers carried on the same kind of 
* See Schwartz on the failure of the early geological attempts of the Greeks ; also Lyell’s 
Principles of Geology, vol. I., chaps. 2-4. 
B 
