352 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



of Geoffrey St. Hilaire, of the philosophical 

 anatomists, and of Richard Owen, was advanced 

 as a compromise between Evolution and the 

 much more recent doctrine of Special Creation. 



Nowhere among the Greek philosophers and 

 biologists is the idea of Special Creation of ani- 

 mal and plant forms by a great designing First 

 Cause even suggested; the relatively late devel- 

 opment of such a concept is attributable to west- 

 ern theological thought only. 



Abiogenesis, or the direct transition from the 

 inorganic to the organic, is seen to have had a 

 host of friends, nearly to the present time, in- 

 cluding, besides all the Greeks, Lucretius, Au- 

 gustine, de Maillet, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, 

 Lamarck, Treviranus, Oken and Chambers. The 

 difficulty of origin has been avoided by the as- 

 sumption of primordial minute masses, which we 

 have seen developed from the *sof t germ' of Aris- 

 totle to the Vesicles' and 'filaments' of Buffon, 

 Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Oken, and finally 

 into our primordial protoplasm. Again, the rudi- 

 ments of the monistic idea of the psychic prop- 

 erties of all matter, foreshadowed by Empedo- 

 cles, are seen revived by de Maupertuis and 

 Diderot. Then we have seen the difficulty of ori- 

 gin removed one step back by the *pre-existent 

 germs' of Anaxagoras, revived by de Maillet, 

 Robinet, Diderot and Bonnet. 



