" All this implies a really
remarkable appreciation of the dependence of vital activities upon the
blood.

This correct physiological conception, however, was by no means the most
remarkable of the ideas to which Empedoeles was led by his anatomical
studies. His greatest accomplishment was to have conceived and clearly
expressed an idea which the modern evolutionist connotes when he speaks
of homologous parts--an idea which found a famous modern expositor in
Goethe, as we shall see when we come to deal with eighteenth-century
science. Empedocles expresses the idea in these words: "Hair, and
leaves, and thick feathers of birds, are the same thing in origin, and
reptile scales too on strong limbs. But on hedgehogs sharp-pointed hair
bristles on their backs."(14) That the idea of transmutation of
parts, as well as of mere homology, was in mind is evidenced by a very
remarkable sentence in which Aristotle asserts, "Empedocles says that
fingernails rise from sinew from hardening." Nor is this quite all,
for surely we find the germ of the Lamarckian conception of evolution
through the transmission of acquired characters in the assertion that
"many characteristics appear in animals because it happened to be thus
in their birth, as that they have such a spine because they happen to be
descended from one that bent itself backward."(15) Aristotle, in
quoting this remark, asserts, with the dogmatism which characterizes the
philosophical commentators of every age, that "Empedocles is wrong," in
making this assertion; but Lamarck, who lived twenty-three hundred years
after Empedocles, is famous in the history of the doctrine of evolution
for elaborating this very idea.

It is fair to add, however, that the dreamings of Empedocles regarding
the origin of living organisms led him to some conceptions that were
much less luminous. On occasion, Empedocles the poet got the better
of Empedocles the scientist, and we are presented with a conception of
creation as grotesque as that which delighted the readers of Paradise
Lost at a later day. Empedocles assures us that "many heads grow up
without necks, and arms were wandering about, necks bereft of shoulders,
and eyes roamed about alone with no foreheads."(16) This chaotic
condition, so the poet dreamed, led to the union of many incongruous
parts, producing "creatures with double faces, offspring of oxen with
human faces, and children of men with oxen heads." But out of this chaos
came, fi