4 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



and, in imparting what they had acquired or dis- 

 covered to younger peoples, that is, younger in 

 culture, they stamped it with an impress all their 

 own. 



At the later period with which we are dealing, 

 refugees from the Peloponnesus, who would not sub- 

 mit to the Dorian yoke, had been long settled in 

 Ionia. To what extent they had been influenced 

 by contact with their neighbours is a question which, 

 even were it easy to answer, need not occupy us 

 here. Certain it is that trade and travel had 

 widened their intellectual horizon, and although 

 India lay too remote to touch them closely (if 

 that incurious, dreamy East had touched them, it 

 would have taught them nothing), there was Baby- 

 lonia with her star-watchers, and Egypt with her 

 land-surveyors. From the one, these lonians pro- 

 bably gained knowledge of certain periodic move- 

 ments of some of the heavenly bodies ; and from 

 the other, a few rules of mensuration, perchance a 

 little crude science. But this is conjecture. For 

 all the rest that she evolved, and with which 

 she enriched the world, ancient Greece is in debt 

 to none. 



While the Oriental shrunk from quest after 

 causes, looking, as Professor Butcher aptly remarks 

 in his Aspects of the Greek Genius, on ' each fresh 

 gain of earth as so much robbery of heaven/ the 

 Greek eagerly sought for the law governing the facts 

 around him. And in Ionia was born the idea foreign 

 to the East, but which has become the starting-point 

 of all subsequent scientific enquiry the idea that 

 Nature works by fixed laws. Sir Henry Maine said 



