ly as the
Babylonian period. In the Assyrian inscriptions we find recorded the
Chaldeo-Babylonian idea of AN EVOLUTION of the universe out of the
primeval flood or "great deep," and of the animal creation out of the
earth and sea. This idea, recast, partially at least, into monotheistic
form, passed naturally into the sacred books of the neighbours and
pupils of the Chaldeans--the Hebrews; but its growth in Christendom
afterward was checked, as we shall hereafter find, by the more powerful
influence of other inherited statements which appealed more intelligibly
to the mind of the Church.

Striking, also, was the effect of this idea as rewrought by the early
Ionian philosophers, to whom it was probably transmitted from the
Chaldeans through the Phoenicians. In the minds of Ionians like
Anaximander and Anaximenes it was most clearly developed: the first of
these conceiving of the visible universe as the result of processes of
evolution, and the latter pressing further the same mode of reasoning,
and dwelling on agencies in cosmic development recognised in modern
science.

This general idea of evolution in Nature thus took strong hold upon
Greek thought and was developed in many ways, some ingenious, some
perverse. Plato, indeed, withstood it; but Aristotle sometimes developed
it in a manner which reminds us of modern views.

Among the Romans Lucretius caught much from it, extending the
evolutionary process virtually to all things.

In the early Church, as we have seen, the idea of a creation direct,
material, and by means like those used by man, was all-powerful for the
exclusion of conceptions based on evolution. From the more simple and
crude of the views of creation given in the Babylonian legends, and
thence incorporated into Genesis, rose the stream of orthodox thought
on the subject, which grew into a flood and swept on through the Middle
Ages and into modern times. Yet here and there in the midst of this
flood were high grounds of thought held by strong men. Scotus Erigena
and Duns Scotus, among the schoolmen, bewildered though they were,
had caught some rays of this ancient light, and passed on to their
successors, in modified form, doctrines of an evolutionary process in
the universe.

In the latter half of the sixteenth century these evolutionary theories
seemed to take more definite form in the mind of Giordano Bruno, who
evidently divined the fundamental idea of what is now known as the
"nebular hypothe