6 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



among Chinese, Japanese, and Maoris, and among 

 the ancient Hindus and Egyptians. 



The earliest school of scientific speculation was 

 at Miletus, the most flourishing city of Ionia. Thales, 

 whose name heads the list of the ' Seven Sages/ was 

 its founder. As with other noted philosophers of 

 this and later periods, the exact date neither of his 

 birth nor of his death is known, but the sixth 

 century before Christ may be held to cover the 

 period when he * flourished/ 



That ' nothing comes into being out of nothing, 

 and that nothing passes away into nothing,' was the 

 conviction with which he, and those who followed 

 him, started on their quest. All around was change : 

 everything always becoming something else ; ' all in 

 motion like streams.' There must be that which is 

 the vehicle of all the changes, and of all the motions 

 which produce them. > What, therefore, was this per- 

 manent and primary substance? in other words, of 

 what is the world made? And Thales, perhaps 

 through observing that it could become vaporous, 

 liquid, and solid in turn ; perhaps if, as tradition 

 records, he visited Egypt through watching the 

 wonder-working, life-giving Nile ; perhaps, as doubt- 

 less sharing the current belief in an ocean-washed 

 earth ; said that the primary substance was WATER. 



Anaximander, his friend and pupil, disagreeing 

 with what seemed to him a too concrete answer, 

 argued, in more abstract fashion, that * the material 

 cause and first element of things was the In- 

 finite.' This material cause, which he was the 

 first thus to name, ' is neither water nor any other 

 of what are now called the elements' (we quote 



