OLDER BELIEFS IN TRANSMUTATION 55 



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". 2 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 ! 3 And he takes it as 

 probable, though it is inter magnalia naturae, that " what- 

 ever 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 is the 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 

 4 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's words, quoted by 

 Mr. Aubrey Moore, are as follows : — ' As to the pro- 

 duction 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.' 4 



How then did the fixity of species become an article of 

 belief in later years ? Aubrey Moore traces it to the in- 

 fluence of Milton's account of creation in the seventh book 



1 Nat. His/., Cent, vi, 522, fol. ed. 



2 loc. cit. p. 523. 3 loc. cit. p. 112. 



4 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol, Prima Pars, Quaest. Ixix. 

 Art. 2. 



