natural sprang from what they called the original elements--fire, air,
earth, water. Anaximander held that animals were begotten from the earth
by means of heat and moisture; and that man was developed from other
beings different in form. Empedocles had a fantastic theory, viz., that
the various parts of man and animals at first existed independently, and
that these--for instance, arms, legs, feet, eyes, etc., gradually
combined--perhaps after the manner in which automobiles are assembled;
and that these combinations became capable of existing and even of
propagating and reproducing themselves. Anaxagoras was of opinion that
animals and plants sprang from the earth by means of germs carried in
the atmosphere which gave fecundity to the earth. Aristotle held opinions
not very unlike those of our own day. All of which goes to show that
speculation about the origin of the universe and the why and wherefore of
living things did not come into existence with the Darwinian hypothesis
and that the doctrine of descent with modification as an explanation of
all biological phenomena antedates by over two thousand years the
publication of the "Origin of Species."

In modern times a theory of development was first suggested by Goethe in
his _"Italienische Reise."_ Acting under the same mental urge for seeing
diverse forms under a unifying principle, Goethe looked for the original
form of plant life, the _Urpflanze_, the plant which would be at once
simple enough to stand for a type of all plants and yet susceptible to
variation in so many directions that all plants might derive from it
their origin. Goethe has also clothed this conception in poetic form.

The first philosophic statement of the hypothesis is found in Immanuel
Kant's _"Kritik der Urteilskraft,"_ 1790. In paragraph 80 we find a
discussion of the similarity between so many species of animals, not
only in their bony structure, but also in the arrangement of their other
parts, a similarity which, says Kant, "casts a ray of hope," that all
forms may be traced back to original simple forms, to "a generation from
a common ancestor," rising from the lowest forms to man, "according to
mechanical laws." Kant assumes that, for instance, certain aquatic
animals by and by formed into amphibia, and from these after some
generations were produced land animals. A treatise of the same
philosopher entitled _"Presumable Origin of Humanity"_ suggests that man
in the early age of the worl