8 THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 
passage or other should show that there had come 
to his mind at least a glimmer of the thought that 
was later to develop into the great idea which the 
modern world calls evolution. 
Among the earliest of these was Anaximander, 
who lived 600 years before Christ. He thought that 
the earth was at first a fluid. Gradually this fluid 
began to dry and grow thicker, and here and there, 
where it thickened most, dry land appeared. When 
this dry land had become firm enough to serve as 
his home, man came up from the water in the form 
of a fish. Slowly and gradually the fish, struggling 
about on the land, gained for himself the limbs and 
members he needed for his new situation and devel- 
oped into a man. After him other animals came up 
in much the same fashion, then the plants, until the 
whole world was clothed with its present inhabitants. 
One hundred and fifty years later Empedocles an- 
nounced a new thought. He said that in the begin- 
nings there were all sorts of strange, incomplete, and 
misjointed monsters which swarmed upon the earth, 
having sprung up out of the earth itself. Each was 
a chaos of the limbs which afterward were to belong 
to other animals which needed them more. Slowly 
and gradually an interchanging came about by which 
appropriate limbs fastened themselves to the proper 
animals. The last of these misjointed creatures is the 
