PREFACE TO EDITION OF 1929 



The first edition of this volume, published in 

 1894, grew out of lectures upon the period be- 

 tween Buffon and Darwin, first delivered in 

 Princeton in 1890 and completed in a fuller in- 

 troductory course of biological lectures upon the 

 period before Buffon, extending back to the 

 Greeks, delivered in Columbia in 1893. 



When I began the search for anticipations of 

 the evolution theory, my object was to bring 

 forward the many strong and true features of 

 pre-Darwinian Evolution during the eighteenth 

 and nineteenth centuries, when the idea was 

 gradually developing into its modern form. 

 Through the German historian Zeller I was led 

 back to the Greek natural philosophers and I 

 was astonished to find how many of the pro- 

 nounced and basic features of the Darwinian the- 

 ory were anticipated even as far back as the 

 seventh century b. c. The splendid period of 

 Greek biologic thought culminated in the natural 

 philosophy of Aristotle and included numerous 

 modern discoveries, not only of Darwinian but 

 of Lamarckian theories of causation. Since 1894< 

 other scholars have greatly extended the discov- 

 eries of Zeller, and biology is deeply indebted to 



