Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/489

 A Note on Greek Anthropology. 425

and very imperfect acquaintance even with imported monkeys, can have prevented Anaximander from assign- ing to Man his proper place in an evolutionary Order of Prwiates."'^ But, if I am right in supposing that Anaximander believed in a transition per saltum, no familiarity with monkeys would have suggested to him this relationship, which seems to have been first clearly indicated by Erasmus Darwin (Osborn, p. 141).^

The theory of a quadrupedal man seems, therefore, to get no support from the first Greek " evolutionist." There remains the evidence of other Greek thinkers who did not subscribe to the belief in a " special creation " of man by divine or heroic agency. The ordinary view of philoso- phers in the sixth and fifth centuries favoured spontaneous generation of man. Xenophanes assigned to man an origin from "earth and water" {R.P. 103); Parmenides held that man was born from slime (e^ l\6o^, see R.P. 126); Anaxagoras believed that all animals, as well as plants, arose from seeds which were brought down by rain from the air {R.P. 160), and this view was popularised by Euripides. Democritus, followed later by Epicurus, held that men were generated from slime; Epicurus added the idea that the first human beings were born as children and nourished by the milk-like juices of the earth until they reached manhood (Censorinus, De Die N. 4, 9). But none of these philosophers, so far as is known, suspected any evolution of man. We now come to Empedocles, who dimly anticipated the idea of the survival of the fittest, and who, if anyone, might have conceived of an ape-like man. In his evolutionary scheme there are four stages, of which, according to Burnet, pp. 280 et seq., only the two last belong to the evolution of the present world. These

^On Anaximander, see Burnet, Early Greek Philosophers, 2nd ed., p. 72.

2 Aristotle {Hist. An., B. 8., 502a) notes that monkeys share their nature both with men and quadrupeds ; but he is of course bringing monkeys up towards men, not men down towards monkeys.