EVOLUTION THE KEY TO NATURE 5 



thinkers had said so. The chief Roman writer on 

 nature, Lucretius, had repeated it. St. Augustine 

 himself, in his best days, thought that all the different 

 species of animals and plants had "grown" out of 

 seeds that had been put in the earth at the begin- 

 ning of time. The wonderful Italian monk of the 

 Middle Ages, Giordano Bruno, taught evolution. But 

 the fate of Bruno reminds us why it was that so few 

 accepted the plain truth of evolution, which had been 

 suggested by the Greeks 2,500 years ago. It was 

 "heresy." All Europe was now convinced that sun 

 and moon and stars, oak and lily and wheat, cat and 

 bird and man, had been created as we know them. 



With this belief science was bound to struggle. 

 Scientific men naturally wanted scientific explana- 

 tions of things, if it were possible. In a sense they 

 wanted to conceive nature as a work of art: a statue 

 that had been slowly carved out of a rude block, or a 

 wonderful fabric that had been gradually woven on 

 "the looms of time." If they could discover the 

 chisels which had carved the statue, or the threads 

 that had been blended in the fabric of nature, it was 

 more intelligible. They very soon learned that 

 nature had grown, during millions of years, to be 

 what it is. The study of the rocks, which was very 

 fairly advanced by the year 1840, was sufficient to 

 prove this. 



The rocks are the vaults of the great living family. 

 When they were opened up, in the eighteenth and 



