54 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



Yet vainly ; for abhorrent Nature quick 

 Checked their vile growths ; . . . 



Hence, doubtless, many a tribe has sunk supprest, 

 Powerless its kind to gender.^ For whate'er 

 Feeds on the living ether, craft or speed. 

 Or courage stern, from age to age preserves 

 In ranks uninjured: . . . 



Yet Centaurs lived not; nor could shapes like 

 these 

 Live ever, from two different natures reared. 

 Discordant limbs, and powers by powers reversed. 



Empedocles imagined that after these unnat- 

 ural products became extinct, other forms arose 

 which were able to support themselves and mul- 

 tiply; but even these were not formed at once. 

 First came shapeless masses built of earth and 

 water, or earth slime, without limbs, organs of 

 reproduction, or speech, thrown from fires be- 

 neath the earth. Later came the separation of 

 the two sexes and the existing mode of reproduc- 

 tion. These trials of Nature were not a succes- 

 sion of organisms, improving as time went on, 

 but a series of direct births from Nature, which 

 were unfit to live, and hence eliminated, until, 

 after ceaseless trials. Nature produced the fit and 

 perpetual tribes. 



Thus in the ancient teachings of Empedocles 

 we find the germ of the theory of the survival of 

 the fittest, or of natural selection, and the abso- 

 lute proof that Empedocles' crude hypothesis 



