42 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



through this influence of the milieu, of their 

 physical surrounding upon their thought. It is 

 in the environment of the sea that we find the 

 inspiration of Greek biological prophecy. Along 

 the shores and in the waters of the blue ^gean, 

 teeming with what we now know to be the earliest 

 and simplest forms of animals and plants, they 

 founded their hypotheses as to the origin and 

 succession of life. Lucretius the Roman was 

 Greek in spirit, but dwelling inland he substi- 

 tuted a terrestrial theory. Even the early Greek 

 natural philosophy sprang more or less from ob- 

 servation, and therefore had some concrete value. 

 It was not wholly imaginative. 



The spirit of the Greeks was vigorous and 

 hopeful. Not pausing to test their theories by re- 

 search, they did not suffer the disappointments 

 and delays which come from our own efforts to 

 wrest truths from Nature. Combined with great 

 freedom and wide range of ideas, independence 

 of thought, and tendencies to rapid generaliza- 

 tion, they had genuine gifts of scientific deduc- 

 tion which enabled them to reach truth, as it 

 were, by inspiration. As a case in point, Aristotle 

 advanced a true theory of the nature of em- 

 bryonic development by a very easy process, 

 when contrasted with the slow steps which led to 

 the establishment of the same theory of epigene- 

 sis in the eighteenth century. 



