EVOLUTION BEFORE DARWIN 9 



one known as the centaur, half-man half -horse. 

 After a while, when all the members had found their 

 proper places, the animals were complete. In one re- 

 spect this opinion foreshadowed our later idea. It 

 suggested that the more perfect animals had arisen 

 out of the less perfect and that the change came 

 gradually. 



Then came Anaxagoras, who was the first to be- 

 lieve that there was intelligent design back of the 

 creation of animals and of plants. He thought there 

 had originally been a slime in which were the germs 

 of all the later plants, animals, and minerals, mixed 

 in a chaos. Slowly order arose. Out of the mix- 

 ture settled first the minerals forming the earth, with 

 the air floating above it, and above the air was the 

 ether. Out of the air the germs of plants settled 

 upon the earth, and vegetation covered the mineral 

 floor. Then from the ether came the germs of ani- 

 mals and of men. These settled among the plants and 

 sprang up into the animals of the world, as well as 

 the people. 



The greatest scientific thinker of early Greece was 

 Aristotle. He had lived by the seashore and knew 

 better than any other man of his times the exquisite 

 seaweeds and the still more beautiful marine animals. 

 He was the first to think of them as a linked series, 

 the higher developing out of the lower under the 



