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 
