aced (not succeeded)
by perfect forms; fourth, that the natural cause of the production of
perfect forms was the extinction of the imperfect." (Op. cit. page
41.) But the fundamental idea of one stage giving origin to another was
absent. As the blue Aegean teemed with treasures of beauty and threw
many upon its shores, so did Nature produce like a fertile artist what
had to be rejected as well as what was able to survive, but the idea of
one species emerging out of another was not yet conceived.

Aristotle's views of Nature (See G.J. Romanes, "Aristotle as a
Naturalist", "Contemporary Review", Vol. LIX. page 275, 1891; G. Pouchet
"La Biologie Aristotelique", Paris, 1885; E. Zeller, "A History of
Greek Philosophy", London, 1881, and "Ueber die griechischen Vorganger
Darwin's", "Abhandl. Berlin Akad." 1878, pages 111-124.) seem to have
been more definitely evolutionist than those of his predecessors, in
this sense, at least, that he recognised not only an ascending scale,
but a genetic series from polyp to man and an age-long movement towards
perfection. "It is due to the resistance of matter to form that Nature
can only rise by degrees from lower to higher types." "Nature produces
those things which, being continually moved by a certain principle
contained in themselves, arrive at a certain end."

To discern the outcrop of evolution-doctrine in the long interval
between Aristotle and Bacon seems to be very difficult, and some of
the instances that have been cited strike one as forced. Epicurus and
Lucretius, often called poets of evolution, both pictured animals as
arising directly out of the earth, very much as Milton's lion long
afterwards pawed its way out. Even when we come to Bruno who wrote that
"to the sound of the harp of the Universal Apollo (the World Spirit),
the lower organisms are called by stages to higher, and the lower stages
are connected by intermediate forms with the higher," there is great
room, as Prof. Osborn points out (op. cit. page 81.), for difference of
opinion as to how far he was an evolutionist in our sense of the term.

The awakening of natural science in the sixteenth century brought the
possibility of a concrete evolution theory nearer, and in the early
seventeenth century we find evidences of a new spirit--in the embryology
of Harvey and the classifications of Ray. Besides sober naturalists
there were speculative dreamers in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries who had at least got