Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/708

702. There are many observers, but few who can strike out into the absolutely virgin soil of novel suggestion.'

Early christian theology reveals very clearly the impress of Greek philosophy, and natural science may be said to have been dominated by it. In so far as the theory of evolution is concerned, history shows beyond all doubt that it took its rise among Ionian philosophers, declined with the decay of Greek science, was kept alive by Greek influence in theology, and, after gathering increased momentum, became revealed in fuller grandeur to Lamarck and Darwin. Yet scholars are by no means agreed concerning the extent to which either the central theory, or its subordinate propositions, such as the law of the survival of the fittest, were developed amongst the Greeks. Many important scientific discoveries were actually anticipated by this ingenious people, though they seem to have felt their way rather by intuition than by inductive reasoning combined with the observational method. It is the belief of conservative writers that the Greeks anticipated the evolution idea by suggestion, or by a series of happy conjectures, though indeed they carried it well into the suggestive stage; nor does it seem possible to maintain a more superlative estimate than this.

The question as to who was the first evolutionist has been answered in various ways. Professor Osborn, in the work above quoted, holds to the belief that it is not Anaximander, but Empedocles of Agrigentum, who 'may justly be called the father of the evolution idea.' Huxley pays a general tribute to the sages of Miletus by calling them 'pronounced evolutionists'; but it is Heraclitus, the corypheus of the Physicists, of whom he avers that 'no better expressions of the essence of the modern doctrine of Evolution can be found than are presented by some of his pithy aphorisms and metaphors.' Haeckel, on the other hand, apostrophizes Anaximander as 'the prophet of Kant and Laplace in cosmogony, and of Lamarck and Darwin in biology.' Another distinguished German critic, Schleiermacher, venerates Anaximander as 'the father of speculative natural science'; and a not unlike sentiment has been voiced by Lyell.

The causes of this singular lack of unanimity are not difficult to trace; they have one and all to do with the original sources. In the first place we must note the different interpretations of the meager yet priceless materials that have come down to us, all derived in the last resort from the 'Opinions' of Theophrastus, a work long since obliterated by the hand of time. Secondly, we must pay due heed to