EMPEDOCLES. 39 



To act all impotent, or flee from harm, 



Or nurture l take, their loathsome days t'extend. 



These sprang at first and things alike uncouth 

 Yet vainly ; for abhorrent NATURE quick 

 Checked their vile growths ; . . . 



Hence, doubtless, many a tribe has sunk supprest, 

 Powerless its kind to gender. 2 For whate'er 

 Feeds on the living ether, craft or speed, 

 Or courage stern, from age to age preserves 

 In ranks uninjured : . . . 



Yet Centaurs lived not ; nor could shapes like these 

 ' Live ever, from two different natures reared, 

 Discordant limbs and powers by powers reversed." 



Empedocles imagined that after these unnatural 

 products became extinct, other forms arose which 

 were able to support themselves and multiply; but 

 even these were not formed at once. First came 

 shapeless masses built of earth and water, or earth 

 slime, without limbs, organs of reproduction, or 

 speech, thrown from fires beneath the earth. Later 

 came the separation of the two sexes and the exist- 

 ing mode of reproduction. These trials of Nature 

 were not a succession of organisms, improving as 

 time went on, but a series of direct births from 

 Nature, which were unfit to live, and hence elimi- 

 nated, until, after ceaseless trials, Nature produced 

 the fit and perpetual tribes. 



Thus, in the ancient teachings of Empedocles, 

 we find the germ of the theory of the Survival 



1-2 It is interesting to note the remote parallel with the modern notion 

 of the ' struggle for existence ' as, mainly, success in feeding and in leaving 

 progeny. 



