14 THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 
there was not in man the power to conceive his own 
origin. 
If we ever wonder why it took so long before the 
thought of evolution should have fully dawned upon 
the world, the answer is not far to seek. No student 
of Natural History in ancient or medieval times had 
the faintest conception of the enormous number of 
animals and of plants in the world. The old Greek 
or Roman student of Natural History gives no evi- 
dence of knowing more than a few hundred ani- 
mals. Men have named to-day, with systematic Latin 
names, hundreds of animals for every one that Pliny 
ever knew, and he knew more than any other man 
of early times of whom record has come to us. 
In early days men who traveled into foreign coun- 
tries brought back accounts of what they saw. The 
whole Natural History of ancient times was filled 
with the most absurd and ludicrous stories of all sorts 
of things to be seen in distant lands. Sir John Man- 
deville tells tales almost as imaginative and quite as 
amusing as those attributed to Baron Munchausen. 
Upon the great awakening of the fifteenth century, 
with its new study and its wide-ranging travel, an 
entire change came over the human mind. Men who 
journeyed into far countries brought back with them 
not only accounts of what they saw, but, so far as 
might be, the things themselves. Collections of plants 
