about in all directions, from all eternity, and which at last
happened into the various forms of the present world.

The ancient Phoenicians held a theory that all life was from the sea;
and that, as the wet mud produces all sorts of herbs in spring now, so
originally it produced all manner of animals. They worshiped it as a
god, and called it Mot, or Mud. Anaximander took up the theory and
carried it out in true Darwinian style, alleging that the first men
sprang from the ground watered by the sea, and that they had spines like
sea urchins; evidently deriving them from the Radiates. Lucretius still
further developed the theory in a poem in six books. The spread of
Christianity, however, hindered the spread of the doctrine, as Mr.
Tyndall feelingly laments, until the Saracens overspread the East, when
some of them, it seems, favored it. But it seems to be an unlucky dogma,
since, with the downfall of the power of the false prophet, the
anti-Christian form of science went down again.

The dogma of the transmutation of species reappeared, however, in the
Romish Church in a religious form; the old heathenism, which had never
been wholly banished from the minds of men, thus reasserting itself.
About the tenth century some began to teach that the bread of the
communion of the Lord's Supper was transubstantiated, and the wine also,
into the body, and blood, and soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus
Christ. This is probably the most complete transmutation of species
which has ever been imagined or described. The evolution of bread into
Deity is only equaled by Mr. Tyndall's endowment of matter with all the
potencies of life and thought; a miracle differing from the popish
transubstantiation only in the element of time, but in its essential
nature equally supernatural. The dogma excited great discussion for
centuries, and produced as many theories of transubstantiation as we now
observe of evolution, keeping philosophic minds and pens busy till the
dawn of modern science after the Reformation.

La Place threw out the Nebular Hypothesis, which is substantially
Democritus' concourse of atoms, only La Place endeavored to substitute
circular motions under the law of gravitation, instead of Democritus'
chance arrangement, as a sufficient cause for the formation and motions
of planets. Herschel's discovery of the nebulae was hastily laid hold of
by a number of writers, and notably by the author of the Vestiges of
Creation, as furnis