In Egypt,
especially, men saw how under this divine power the Nile slime
brought forth "creeping things innumerable." Hence mainly this
ancient belief that the animals and man were produced by lifeless
matter at the divine command, "in the beginning," was supplemented
by the idea that some of the lesser animals, especially the
insects, were produced by a later evolution, being evoked after the
original creation from various sources, but chiefly from matter in
a state of decay.
This crude, early view aided doubtless in giving germs of a better
evolution theory to the early Greeks. Anaximander, Empedocles,
Anaxagoras, and, greatest of all, Aristotle, as we have seen,
developed them, making their way at times by guesses toward truths
since established by observation. Aristotle especially, both by
speculation and observation, arrived at some results which, had
Greek freedom of thought continued, might have brought the world
long since to its present plane of biological knowledge; for he
reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher
organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a
perfecting principle" in Nature.
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