68 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



dogma the temporalising of the one, and the 

 crystallising of the other. Yet one prominent actor 

 in that history demands a brief notice, because of 

 the influence which his teaching wielded from the 

 fifth to the fifteenth centuries. The annals of the 

 churches in Africa, along whose northern shores 

 Christianity had spread early and rapidly, yield 

 notable names, but none so distinguished as that 

 of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo from 395 to 430 

 A.D. This greatest of the Fathers of the Church 

 sought, as has been remarked already, to bring the 

 system of Aristotle, the greatest of ancient naturalists, 

 into line with Christian theology. His range of 

 study was well-nigh as wide as that of the famous 

 Stagirite, but we are here concerned only with so 

 much of it as bears on an attempt to graft the 

 development theory on the dogma of special creation. 

 Augustine, accepting the Old Testament cosmogony 

 as a revelation, believed that the world was created 

 out of nothing, but, this initial paradox accepted, 

 he argued that God had endowed matter with cer- 

 tain powers of self-development which left free the 

 operation of natural causes in the production of 

 plants and animals. Conjoined with this, as already 

 noted, he held, with preceding philosophers and 

 with his fellow -theologians, the doctrine of spon- 

 taneous generation. It explained to him the exist- 

 ence of apparently purposeless creatures, as flies, 

 frogs, mice, etc. * Certain very small animals,' he 

 says, ' may not have been created on the fifth and 

 sixth days, but may have originated later from 

 putrefying matter/ Not till the seventeenth century 

 did the experiments of Redi refute a doctrine which 



