8 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



essentials of biological science, goes back very far. 

 . . . The Greek people had many roots, racial, cul- 

 tural, and spiritual, and from them all they in- 

 herited various powers and qualities and derived va- 

 rious ideas and traditions. . . . For the earliest 

 biological achievements of Greek peoples we have to 

 rely largely on information gleaned from artistic 

 remains. It is true that we have a few fragments of 

 the works of both Ionian and Italo-Sicilian philoso- 

 phers, and in them we read of theoretical speculation 

 as to the nature of life and of the soul, and we can 

 thus form some idea of the first attempts of such 

 workers as Alcmaeon of Croton (c. 500 b. c.) to lay 

 bare the structure of animals by dissection. 



Not until the middle of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury was natural science wholly equipped for 

 Evolution on the inductive line. The long and 

 tedious way of direct observation in anatomy and 

 palaeontology had to be paved for it; one proof 

 of this is found in the failure of the strong evo- 

 lution movement in France during the latter 

 part of the eighteenth and beginning of the nine- 

 teenth century. In the middle of the nineteenth 

 century came the time and the man who ranks 

 as the great central observer and generalizer. 

 Under the impetus of Darwin, the first steps 

 were to establish, as a natural law, what had 

 ranked for over two thousand years as an hy- 

 pothesis, not to say theory, and this has been 

 most thoroughly done in the last seventy years. 



