382 EVOLUTION AND DOGMA. 



produced ; and that from these germs all forms of 

 life, from polyps to man, should be evolved by the 

 operation of natural causes. How like St. Augus- 

 tine's teaching, that God in the beginning created all 

 things potentially, in seminc, potentialiter, and that 

 these were afterwards developed through the action 

 of secondary causes, causales rationes, during the 

 course of untold ages per volumina saculorum! 



Influence of Aristotle. 



Having now before our minds the achievements 

 of Aristotle in the domain of science, and understand- 

 ing what were his contributions to the evolutionary 

 view of nature, it is not difficult for us to account 

 for the paramount influence which he wielded in 

 the world of thought for full twenty centuries; why 

 he was so long regarded as the guide of naturalists 

 and philosophers, as the " magister " of Fathers and 

 Schoolmen, and why his views impregnated the 

 teachings, not only of thinkers like Descartes, Bacon, 

 Leibnitz, Kant and Schelling, but also tinctured the 

 speculations of such naturalists as De Maillet, Oken, 

 Robinet, Buffon, Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin. 



Nor is this all. Although less than in the writ- 

 ings of the authors just named, we can trace the in- 

 fluence of the old Greek master in still more recent 

 works ; in those of Goethe and Lamarck, Treviranus 

 and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier and Bory de St. 

 Vincent. These, with even later investigators, Von 

 Baer, Serres, Spencer, Richard Owen, Naudin, 

 Wallace, Charles Darwin and St. George Mivart, 

 have but developed the germs and elaborated the 



