8 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



animals quickly find food for themselves, man alone 

 requires a prolonged period of suckling," he antici- 

 pates the modern explanation of the origin of the 

 rudimentary family through the development of the 

 social instincts and affections. The lengthening of 

 the period of infancy involves dependence on the 

 parents, and evolves the sympathy which lies at the 

 base of social relations. (Cf. Fiske's Outlines of Cos- 

 mic Philosophy, vol. ii, pp. 344, 360.) 



In dealing with speculations so remote, we have 

 to guard against reading modern meanings into writ- 

 ings produced in ages whose limitations of knowl- 

 edge were serious, and whose temper and standpoint 

 are wholly alien to our own. For example, shrewd 

 as are some of the guesses made by Anaximander, 

 we find him describing the sun as " a ring twenty- 

 eight times the size of the earth, like a cartwheel 

 with the felloe hollow and full of fire, showing the 

 fire at a certain point, as if through the nozzle of a 

 . pair of bellows." And if he made some approach 

 to truer ideas of the earth's shape as " convex and 

 round," the world of his day, as in the days of 

 Homer, thought of it as flat and as floating on the 

 all-surrounding water. The Ionian philosophers 

 lacked not insight, but the scientific method of start- 

 ing with working hypotheses, or of observation be- 

 fore theory, was as yet unborn. 



In this brief survey of the subject there will be 

 no advantage in detailing the various speculations 

 which followed on the heels of those of Thales and 



