14 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



deem that what before was not comes into being, or 

 that aught can perish and be utterly destroyed." 

 Therefore the " roots " or elements are eternal and 

 indestructible. They are acted upon by two forces, 

 which are also material, Love and Strife; the one 

 a uniting agent, the other a disrupting agent. From 

 the four roots, thus operated upon, arise " the colours 

 and forms " of living things ; trees first, both male 

 and female, then fragmentary parts of animals, heads 

 without necks, and " eyes that strayed up and down 

 in want of a forehead," which,, combined together, 

 produced monstrous forms. These, lacking power 

 to propagate, perished, and were replaced by "whole- 

 natured " but sexless " forms " which " arose from 

 the earth," and which, as Strife gained the upper 

 hand, became male and female. Herein, amidst 

 much fantastic speculation, would appear to be the 

 germ of the modern theory that the unadapted be- 

 come extinct, and that only the adapted survive. 

 Nature kills ofif her failures to make room for her 

 successes. 



Anaxagoras, who was a contemporary of Empe- 

 docles, interests us because he was the first philoso- 

 pher to repair to Athens, and the first sufferer for 

 truth's sake of whom we have record in Greek an- 

 nals. Because he taught that the sun was a red- 

 hot stone, and that the moon had plains and ravines 

 in it, he was put upon his trial, and but for the in- 

 fluence of his friend, the famous Pericles, might have 

 suffered death. Speculations, however tiold they be, 



