PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



PART I. 



PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION FROM THALES 

 TO LUCRETIUS. 



B. C. 600-A. D. 50. 



" These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but 

 having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of tliem." — He- 

 brews xi. 13, 



" One event is always the son of another, and we 

 must never forget the parentage," said a Bechuana 

 chief to Casalis the missionary. The barbarian phi- 

 losopher spoke wiser than he knew, for in his words 

 lay that doctrine of continuity and unity which is the 

 creed of modern science. They are a suitable text 

 to the discourse of this chapter, the design of which 

 is to bring out what the brilliancy of present-day 

 discoveries tends to throw into shadow, namely, the 

 antiquity of the ideas of which those discoveries are 

 the result. Although the Theory of Evolution, as we 

 define it, is new, the speculations which made it pos- 

 sible are, at least, twenty-five centuries old. In- 

 deed, it is not practicable, since the remote past 

 yields no documents, to fix their beginnings. More- 

 over, charged, as they are, with many crudities, they 

 are not detachable from the barbaric conceptions of 



