CHAPTER n 



HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 



EVOLUTION THEORY 



H. H. Newman 



The chief sources of material for the present chapters are: Osbom's 

 From the Greeks to Darwin^ and Judd's The Coming of Evolutiop:^ 



Professor Osbom studies the evolution of the evolution idea as a 

 biologist would investigate the evolution of a group of species, using 

 all of the available sources of evidence at his disposal. The jragmen ts 

 of ancient writing^ and th e crude imaginings of early natural philoso- 

 pheri~are ttie fossils of the evolution idea, many of them ancestors 

 o f moHern prind p]£s7~"l'ragmenis of ancient or discard ed ideas that 

 stiEpersistjthough irr elevantto^modern"""thought, are the ve stigial 

 structures that proclaim kinship between t he past and the pr esent; 

 parallelisms between the development otlcleas in the minds of inde- 

 pendent thinkers do not prove plagiarism, but indicate common 

 descent from the same ancestral ideas. 



This whole history is an important chapter in the story of human 

 evolution in general, for it deals with the evolution of a characteristic 

 human faculty — that of appreciating the broad relations that exist 

 between the past and the present. This faculty has evolved as truly 

 as has an organic system such as the nervous system, and is unques- 

 tionably closely bound up with the latter. 



The pynlnjipn tVipr»ry j fi a vast fabric of interrelated and inter- 

 dep endent fa cts and principles. The fabric has beeiTgradually^oven 

 out of separate threads and now stands strong though flexible, with 

 strands reaching into all sciences and tending to unify all science. 



It was only after the lesser ideas came to be cleat ly apprehended" 

 that it was possible for the master minds of Lamarck and of Darwin to 

 weave them together into a consistent fabric and to bring the facts 

 together under the one great conception, that of organic evolution. 

 Classification was a science, comparative anatomy had made much 

 progress, the principles of embryology were fairly well imderstood, 



' H. F. Osbom, From 'he Greeks to Danvin (The Macmillan Company, 1908).'' 

 * John W. Judd, Tk€ Coming of Evolution (Cambridge University Press, 191 1). 



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