9th November, 1920. 

 Presidential Address. 



"thp: trend of evolutionary thought." 



By Professor Oregg Wilson, O.B.E., M.A., D.Sc, M.R.I.A. 



The doctrine of e\'olation is no new idea, nor is the chief 

 modern controversy in connection with it new. I refer to the 

 dispute between mechanists " and A'italists." 



The ancient Greeks had more or less clear beliefs as to the 

 fact of evolution "', and differed fundamentally among themselves 

 as to explanation of the fact, just as we of the twentieth century 

 do. Empedocles of Agrigentum (495 — 435 B.C.), who has been 

 called "the father of the evolution idea," may be named as a 

 type of those who explained things largely by chance. He 

 believed in spontaneous generation of the living from the not- 

 living ; that plants came before animals ; that parts of animals 

 appeared before entire animals ; and that, as a result of the 

 triumph of love over hate, these parts united, but purely 

 fortuitously. Most of the resulting monstrous combinations, he 

 supposed, were unfit to live, but in time there arose by chance 

 forms that were able to maintain themselves and multiply. It 

 was a crude beginning, but it served as a foundation, on which 

 Epicurus and others built up a purely mechanical conception of 

 nature. Aristotle (384 — ^322 B.C.) gives an account of evolution 

 that is much more modern in character, and his explanation is 

 distinctly vitalistic. He believed in a progressive development 

 from a primordial soft mass of living matter to the highest forms 

 of animals. He adopted the doctrine (now specially associated 

 with the name of Lamarck) that characters acquired by an animal 



* See H. F. Osborn : "From the Greeks to Darwin." Macmillau 

 &Co., 1908. 



