d the scientific world of its truth, and of the later
minds that are modifying and enlarging the idea of the master
evolutionist. It tries to tell what science perhaps vaguely hopes as
to the future. What are we to be? Can we help the great advance?

The Meaning of Evolution

CHAPTER I

EVOLUTION BEFORE DARWIN

Ever since men have been able to think they must have puzzled out for
themselves some way of accounting for their own beginnings. Every
savage tribe with whom we have any intimate acquaintance has some
story that accounts for the origin of the tribe at least, and often
for the beginning of the world. These stories are handed down from
generation to generation and are scarcely questioned in the thought of
most men. In early Greece there was a succession of men whom the world
calls philosophers. These men thought earnestly and deeply on all
kinds of questions. Their method was not our method. The plan of
making a long series of observations, before coming to any conclusion,
was not the habit of their minds. They reasoned out on general
principles what seemed to them must have been the origin of the world.
It is not strange that among these should come, now and then, some one
who in some passage or other should show that there had come to his
mind at least a glimmer of the thought that was later to develop into
the great idea which the modern world calls evolution.

Among the earliest of these was Anaximander, who lived 600 years
before Christ. He thought that the earth was at first a fluid.
Gradually this fluid began to dry and grow thicker, and here and
there, where it thickened most, dry land appeared. When this dry land
had become firm enough to serve as his home, man came up from the
water in the form of a fish. Slowly and gradually the fish, struggling
about on the land, gained for himself the limbs and members he needed
for his new situation and developed into a man. After him other
animals came up in much the same fashion, then the plants, until the
whole world was clothed with its present inhabitants.

One hundred and fifty years later Empedocles announced a new thought.
He said that in the beginnings there were all sorts of strange,
incomplete, and misjointed monsters which swarmed upon the earth,
having sprung up out of the earth itself. Each was a chaos of the
limbs which afterward were to belong to other animals which needed
them more. Slowly and gradually an interchanging came abou