Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/710

704 Believing, as we think rightly, that Anaximander should be regarded as the earliest precursor of Darwin, it will be profitable for us at this point to examine the small collection of fragments which have survived, and which constitute the authentic sources of information in respect to his ideas of organic evolution. Notwithstanding these fragments are but five in number, they have not hitherto been searched out and brought together under one head in English form. Those desirous of consulting the original texts will find them collated in the indispensable works of Hermann Diels, Bitter and Preller, Fairbanks, Mullach and others.

Stromat. 2 ( 579).—Further he [Anaximander] declares that in the beginning man must have been born from animals of a different species. His reason is that, whereas other animals quickly find food for themselves, man alone requires long rearing. And it is evident that had he been originally such as he now is, he could never have survived.

Philosoph., I., 6 ( 660).—Primitive animals were derived from moisture evaporated by the sun. In the beginning man was of very different form than at present, and resembled a fish.

Plac, V., 19, 4 ( 430).—Anaximander taught that the first animals were begotten in the water, and were covered with prickly integuments; on attaining sufficient age, they emerged upon the land, and, their coverings having burst, they soon changed their manner of life.

Symp., VIII., 8, 4 (Diels, Fragm. d. Vor-Sokrat., p. 20).—Wherefore they (the Syrians) reverence the fish as of the same origin and the same family as man, holding a more reasonable philosophy than that of Anaximander. For he declares, not that fishes and men were generated at the same time, but that at first men were engendered in the form of fishes; and that growing up as sharks do till they were able to nourish themselves, they then came forth on dry ground.

Dies Natal., 4, 7.—Anaximander of Miletus believed that either fish, or animals very like fish, sprang from heated earth and water, and that