Thb Evolution op thb Idea op Evolution S 



of a vague mist of chaotic matter that once filled our 

 portion of space. Just as all the countless forms of 

 steam engines to-day have evolved from a kettle pushing 

 a poker with the steam from its spout; and all our 

 national constitutions from the primitive social arrange- 

 ments of a group of savages. 



The universality of evolution implies, of course, that 

 the idea itself was slowly developed, and it is interesting 

 to glance at this before we apply it on a large scale. It 

 is one of the most surprising things in the history of 

 thought to find that the idea of the evolution of the 

 world and the living things in it was held by a great 

 many people more than two thousand years ago. Almost 

 as soon as that most brilliant of the ancient nations, the 

 Greeks, began to speculate on the past history and 

 present nature of the world about them, they felt that 

 this was the key to the mystery of existence. In the 

 energetic life of the Greek colonists in Asia Minor, six 

 hundred years before Christ, a great stimulus was given 

 to thought about the world, independently of the childlike 

 legends of the race. One of the earliest of these thinkers, 

 Thales (who lived about 600 B.C.), declared that all the 

 solid and very varied things in the world about him had 

 grown in the course of ages out of some vague universal 

 fluid; in other words, he thought that water was the 

 primitive element, and all other things " developed " — as 

 we should now say — out of it. One of his pupils, 

 Anaximandes (about 570 B.C.), thought that all living 

 things had come out of non-living slime, and passed 

 through many forms before they reached their present 

 shapes. He even made the perfectly sound point that 

 there was a time when man was a fish. A third member 

 of the school, Heraclitus, held that fire was the primitive 

 element. 



As time went on, this vague notion that living things 



