When the times began to lighten we find the schoolmen, among the greatest of whom was Thomas Aquinas. Referring especially to the authority of his master, St. Augustine, he says that it would be easy mistakenly to believe that the author of Genesis meant to convey the idea that on each of the six days certain acts of creation were performed. It is quite evident, thinks Aquinas, that in those early times God only created the germs of things and put into the earth powers which should later become active. After the Creator had thus endowed the earth he rested from the work, which proceeded to develop under the influence of these first germs.
Nearly four hundred years later, when Europe had finally awakened out of the deep and refreshing sleep in which it had fortunately forgotten much of the past, a new era dawned and modern thought began. Immediately men commenced to busy their minds with broader problems than they had been discussing since the time of the Greek philosophers. The hand of tradition, however, was heavy on them still. They dreaded to run counter to authority, and did not dare think unrestrainedly. Descartes shows us how we can understand things better if we will imagine a few principles by which it will be easy to account for things as they are. Then he carefully elaborates these principles as they occur to him; but he has no sooner done so than he takes care to add, "Of course, we know the earth was not made in this way."
A little later the philosopher, Leibnitz, believed in an orderly creation that had advanced by regular degrees, and that the lower animals had thus developed into the higher. He adds interestingly that there are probably on some other planets animals midway between the ape and man, but that nature has kindly removed such animals from the earth in order that man's superiority to the apes should be entirely beyond question.
By the middle of the eighteenth century men had begun to think more fearlessly. The great Emanuel Kant wrote in his younger and less timid years, "The General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens." The great Newton had by his law of gravitation brought order into the heavens. Kant looked longingly for a greater Newton, who should find a similar unity in the animal world. He saw the wonderful likenesses between animals that the anatomist, Buffon, had recently pointed out. He believed there must somehow be blood relationship between all animals. He tried hard to conceive of some underlying natural cause by which all could have come about. As he grew older and his mind became more cautious he came to think the matter deeper than the human mind could ever fathom. He gave up the hope and believed the problem of animal origin and derivation would forever remain insoluble. He feared there was not in man the power to conceive his own origin.
If we ever wonder why it took so long before the thought of evolution should have fully dawned upon the world, the answer is not far to seek. No student of Natural History in ancient or medieval times had the faintest conception of the enormous number of animals and of plants in the world. The old Greek or Roman student of Natural History gives no evidence of knowing more than a few hundred animals. Men have named to-day, with systematic Latin names, hundreds of animals for every one that Pliny ever knew, and he knew more than any other man of early times of whom record has come to us.
In early days men who traveled into foreign countries brought back accounts of what they saw. The whole Natural History of ancient times was filled with the most absurd and ludicrous stories of all sorts of things to be seen in distant lands. Sir John Mandeville tells tales almost as imaginative and quite as amusing as those attributed to Baron Munchausen.
Upon the great awakening of the fifteenth century, with its new study and its wide-ranging travel, an entire change came over the human mind. Men who journeyed into far countries brought back with them not only accounts of what they saw, but, so far as might be, the things themselves. Collections of plants and of such parts of animals as could be readily preserved soon began to accumulate in every great center of Europe. It was only a question of time when such acquisitions must be arranged and classified, but as yet there was no system by which this could be done. The great Swedish botanist, Linnæus, who lived in the eighteenth century, first taught us to give to each animal and plant two Latin names, the first of these to be the name of the group, known as a genus, to which it belongs, the second to be the name of that sort, or species, of animal. The cat, for instance, is Felis catus, the lion Felis leo, the tiger Felis tigris, and so on. Linnæus then arranged the genera (plural of genus) into families, and these families into orders and so classified the animal and plant world as far as he knew it. In his earlier years Linnæus thought of each species as being utterly apart and distant from any other. He believed it had been so from the first, each species having sprung in its complete form from the creative hand of God. In later life he came to show some evidence of the belief in development, but his great work is all built on the idea of the entire fixity of species.
About this time we find in the writings of Buffon, the French naturalist, many indications of an idea approaching our modern conceptions of evolution. He felt sure the pig could not have been a special creation, because he had four toes, two of which, with all their bones and their hoofs, are quite useless to him. We now call these toes "vestigial," and know the pig's ancestors used them, walking on four toes and not on two, as at present. Buffon believed there were degenerations as well as developments, and considered the ape a degenerate man. He conceived these changes to be brought about by what he called the favors and disfavors of nature. He varied much in his opinions in various parts of his career and occasionally is smitten either with conscience or with fear of authority. Then he goes back and says it is all a mistake and each animal is the product of a special act on the part of the Creator.
A little later, in England, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, who was subsequently to establish the evolution theory, wrote a long and elaborate poem called the "Temple of Nature." In this we find a remarkable prevision of many of the principles which were afterward to be warmly advocated and disputed during the growth of the idea of evolution.
"Hence without parents by spontaneous growth,
Rise the first specks of animated life.