ds perfection. "It is
due to the resistance of matter to form that Nature can only rise by
degrees from lower to higher types." "Nature produces those things
which, being continually moved by a certain principle contained in
themselves, arrive at a certain end."

To discern the outcrop of evolution-doctrine in the long interval
between Aristotle and Bacon seems to be very difficult, and some of
the instances that have been cited strike one as forced. Epicurus and
Lucretius, often called poets of evolution, both pictured animals as
arising directly out of the earth, very much as Milton's lion long
afterwards pawed its way out. Even when we come to Bruno who wrote
that "to the sound of the harp of the Universal Apollo (the World
Spirit), the lower organisms are called by stages to higher, and the
lower stages are connected by intermediate forms with the higher,"
there is great room, as Prof. Osborn points out,[4] for difference of
opinion as to how far he was an evolutionist in our sense of the term.

The awakening of natural science in the sixteenth century brought the
possibility of a concrete evolution theory nearer, and in the early
seventeenth century we find evidences of a new spirit--in the
embryology of Harvey and the classifications of Ray. Besides sober
naturalists there were speculative dreamers in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries who had at least got beyond static formulae,
but, as Professor Osborn points out,[5] "it is a very striking fact,
that the basis of our modern methods of studying the Evolution problem
was established not by the early naturalists nor by the speculative
writers, but by the Philosophers." He refers to Bacon, Descartes,
Leibnitz, Hume, Kant, Lessing, Herder, and Schelling. "They alone were
upon the main track of modern thought. It is evident that they were
groping in the dark for a working theory of the Evolution of life, and
it is remarkable that they clearly perceived from the outset that the
point to which observation should be directed was not the past but the
present mutability of species, and further, that this mutability was
simply the variation of individuals on an extended scale."

Bacon seems to have been one of the first to think definitely about
the mutability of species, and he was far ahead of his age in his
suggestion of what we now call a Station of Experimental Evolution.
Leibnitz discusses in so many words how the species of animals may be
changed and how inte