Decembeb 21, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



601 



Was he unfortunate enough to receive into 

 his veins the poison of malaria, it was be- 

 cause an evil spirit had entered into him 

 and had to be induced to come out by a 

 bribe, or driven out by the use of mystic 

 combinations of words which were calcu- 

 lated to cast a spell over it. So when the 

 author of creation was thought of it was 

 in the form of an animal like those he 

 hunted, but much bigger. A turtle, swim- 

 ming in the primeval ocean, dives down, 

 as he had often seen it, and, coming up, 

 bears upon its back some of the mud from 

 the bottom, and on this, trees grow and 

 living creatures move and among them 

 all, himself. At times the load grows 

 heavy, and the turtle moves, and the 

 earth quakes, and perhaps some day the 

 whole will slip again beneath the waves. 



Or, again, a number of animals have es- 

 caped the destruction of a previous earth 

 on a raft. They float for many days upon 

 the face of the waters and find no place 

 for the soles of their feet to rest. They 

 take turns at diving in order to bring up 

 some earth from the bottom, but it is not 

 until several of them had essayed the task 

 that a grain of sand is recovered. From 

 this they mold the new earth, and then 

 disembark and a new era commences. 



These simple theriomorphie tales are 

 found among the less advanced races. In 

 the minds of those who had observed more 

 carefully, and thought more deeply, pro- 

 founder ideas began to prevail. To the 

 thinker of Neolithic times, as indeed to 

 him of to-day, one of the most wonderful 

 things in nature is an egg. "Within this 

 thing, apparently so simple in its consti- 

 tution, there is developed, and that in the 

 course of a very short time, all the com- 

 plexity of structure of reptile or bird. 

 Perhaps even he dimly realized that aU 

 things living proceed from an egg. It was 

 evident also that the order of nature is 

 from the simple to the complex, and the 



world, in its marvelous complexity, is no 

 doubt, he thought, a living thing. "What 

 would be more natural, then, than that the 

 world itself is the final product of the de- 

 velopment of an egg? This theory is 

 found again and again in the mythologies 

 of ancient races, persisting even among 

 the stories of a nobler cosmogony. Thus 

 in the Book of Manu, in Indian Classics, 

 we read "the self-existing lord, with a 

 thought, created the waters, and deposited 

 in them a seed which became a golden egg, 

 in which egg he himself is born as Brahma, 

 the progenitor of the world." 



"We have now come to the stage in hu- 

 man development when it was no longer 

 necessary to explain the origin of the 

 world in terms of beasts or demigods. A 

 new theory now had to be formulated in 

 the light of increased knowledge and 

 broader mental grasp. To some it may 

 have appeared that things had always ex- 

 isted as they are, but the philosophical ne- 

 cessity for an explanation of origins early 

 impressed itself upon the minds of the 

 Greeks, who were the first to devote them- 

 selves to such speculations. 



Two alternatives formed the founda- 

 tions for the theories of two opposing 

 schools of thought, the one of monism, the 

 other of dualism. To Leucippus and 

 Demoeritus and their disciples the world 

 appeared to have been the result of a for- 

 tuitous concourse of atoms. Behind it all 

 they saw no plan, no intelligence. This 

 was the underljdng concept of the great 

 poem "De Eerum Natura" of the Latin 

 poet Lucretius, who lived in the fii'st cen- 

 tury B.C. He tells us : 



Nam certe neque concilio primordia rerum 

 ordine se suo quaeque sagaci mente loearvmt 



(5: 419), 

 which maj'' be translated: 



For verily not bj^ design did the first- 



