EVOLUTION 913 



interesting to notice Aristotle's anticipation of the idea of the 

 struggle for existence: "Animals are at war with one another when 

 they live in the same place and use the same food. If the food be 

 not sufficiently abundant they fight for it even with those of the 

 same kind." Reference may be made to G. J. Romanes, "Aristotle 

 as a Naturalist", Contemporary Review, vol. lix, p. 275; D'Arcy W. 

 Thompson, Aristotle as Biologist. 



ADUMBRATIONS. — No doubt the general idea of evolution was 

 in the background of many minds, century after century, but there 

 has been, we think, a tendency to overstrain the recognition of 

 adumbrations. Thus the case for Giordano Bruno as evolutionist 

 seems to us very unconvincing, and the same may be said in regard 

 to other so-called precursors. Even if we take Lucretius, he was an 

 evolutionist in the sense that he gave a poetic picture of a process 

 of gradual Becoming, both cosmic and animate; yet he was not an 

 evolutionist in his theory that living creatures arose by successive 

 stages from the bosom of Mother Earth. Of the modern view of one 

 species arising by variation from another, he had no suggestion ; in 

 fact he was nearer Milton's creationist picture of the lion pawing 

 its way out of the earth. Yet Lucretius had an anticipation of a 

 struggle for existence in which animals work out their destiny. For 

 after speaking of their courage, craft, swiftness, and utility to man, 

 he writes: "But those to whom nature has granted none of these 

 qualities, so that they could neither live by their own means, nor 

 perform for us any useful service, in return for which we should 

 suffer their kind to feed and be safe under our protection, those, 

 you are to know, would lie exposed as a prey and booty of others, 

 hampered all in their own death-bringing shackles, until nature 

 brought that kind to utter destruction." 



EVOLUTIONIST PHILOSOPHERS.— The evolution of theories 

 of evolution is bound up with the whole progress of the world ; and 

 the rehabilitation of evolutionism that may be associated with the 

 Renaissance was doubtless the outcome of many factors. Evolu- 

 tionist ideas were beginning to be applied to other orders of facts, 

 notably in regard to the earth and the solar system; Biology itself 

 was beginning to arise, as in the classification of Ray and the 

 embryology of Harvey. There were arousing changes in human life 

 which must be taken account of' — the collapse of the feudal system, 

 the increase of travel and the discovery of America, the invention of 

 printing and the founding of Universities, and many more besides. 

 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the distinction between 

 philosophers and scientific investigators was not so painfully marked 

 as it is to-day, but it is noteworthy that the evolution-idea was for 

 a long time more at home among the philosophers than among the 



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