Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - A History of Evolution (1922).djvu/17

 14 says he, "these young earth-children were nourished by springs of milk."

Thus we see that Lucretius, although an excellent poet, was neither a good evolutionist nor a first-rate philosopher. In his abandonment of Aristotle he discarded the only phase of Greek thought which had come near to true conceptions of evolution, and in expounding the doctrine of spontaneous generation, he fostered an idea that was to prove of almost infinite harm to the evolution idea.

There was no one to carry on the work. Greece was no longer a great nation; her "philosophers" were mostly second-rate tutors. Rome produced no naturalists of note, Pliny, the greatest, being of small capacity for reliable observation. The Greeks had done much; they had asked questions and insofar as they were able, had given answers. They left the world face to face with the problem of natural causation, and their ideas endured as a basis for the work of future scientists and philosophers.