Car) 
modern science’ as he is called, though he was only a school- 
man touched with empiricism, believed not only that one 
species might pass into another, but that it was a matter of 
chance what the transmutation would be. Sometimes the 
medieval notion of vivification from putrefaction is appealed 
to, as where he explains the reason why oak boughs put into 
the earth send forth wild vines, ‘which, if it be true (no 
doubt), he says,* ‘it is not the oak that turneth into a vine, 
but the oak bough, putrefying, qualifieth the earth to put 
forth a vine of itself... Sometimes he suggests a reason which 
implies a kind of law, as when he thinks that the stump of a 
beech tree when cut down will ‘ put forth birch,’ because it 
is a ‘tree of a smaller kind which needeth less nourishment.’ t 
Elsewhere he suggests the experiment of polling a willow to 
see what it will turn into, he himself having seen one which 
had a bracken fern growing out of it!{ And he takes it as 
probable, though it is inter magnalia nature, that ‘ whatever 
creature having life is generated without seed, that creature 
will change out of one species into another.’ Bacon looks 
upon the seed as a restraining power, limiting a variation 
which, in spontaneous generations, is practically infinite, ‘for 
it isthe seed, and the nature of it, which locketh and boundeth 
in the creature that it doth not expatiate.’” And the author 
also shows that much earlier than the date at which Bacon 
wrote, theologians were by no means unanimous in accepting 
“ special creation ” ; that St. Augustine even distinctly rejected 
it, and propounded an idea which was evidently considered 
tenable by the greatest of the schoolmen, St. Thomas Aquinas. 
St. Thomas’ words, quoted by Mr. Aubrey Moore, are as 
follows :—‘“ As to the production of plants, Augustine holds 
a different view. For some expositors say that, on this third 
day (of creation), plants were actually produced each in his 
kind—a view which is favoured by a superficial reading of 
the letter of Scripture. But Augustine says that the earth 
is then said to have brought forth grass and trees causaliter— 
i.e. it then received the power to produce them.” § 
* ‘Nat. Hist.” Cent. vi, 522, fol. ed. - 
+ L.c. p. 523. de Capa) las 
§ St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘‘Summa Theol.” Prima Pars. Quaest., isatre- 
Art. 2. 
PROC. ENT. SOC. LOND., v. 1903. H 
