Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - Darwin and the Theory of Evolution.djvu/10



Darwin owed more to the early workers in evolution than generally is admitted, or he himself supposed. To an even greater extent he paralleled the work of his predecessors, many of whose books he had not even read. Thus even the theory of natural selection was published while Darwin still believed in special creation, although the mention of it was buried in a huge volume of timber suitable for naval construction.

This does not, of course, show that Charles Darwin lacked originality, or that his work lacked merit. Man began to wonder about the origin of living things long before he had the slightest inkling of either science or philosophy, and it is only natural that the more he knew the more he would speculate about that which he did not know. The early speculations, which dealt with gods rather than with animals or plants, soon were subjected to scrutiny along with the facts that they attempted to explain. Twenty-four centuries before the birth of Darwin, the Greek philosopher Thales taught that all life originated in the sea, and developed in accordance with natural law rather than the wills of the gods. In the eighteenth century, Goethe, Erasmus Darwin, and Geoffroy St.