ferred therefrom that the sea had once covered that whole region. Empedocles, of Agrigentum (450 b. c.), believed that the many hippopotamus-bones found in Sicily were remains of human giants, in comparison with which the present race were as children. Here, he thought, was a battle-field between the gods and the Titans, and the bones belonged to the slain. Pythagoras (582 b. c.) had already anticipated one conclusion of modern geology, if the following statement, attributed to him by Ovid, was his own:[1]
"Vidi ego quod fuerat solidissima tellus,
Esse fretum: vidi factas ex æquore terras;
Et procul a pelago conchæ Jacuere marinæ."
Aristotle (384-322 b. c.) was not only aware of the existence of fossils in the rocks, but has also placed on record sagacious views as to the changes in the earth's surface necessary to account for them. In the second book of his "Meteorics," he says: "The changes of the earth are so slow in comparison to the duration of our lives, that they are overlooked; and the migrations of people after great catastrophes and their removal to other regions, cause the event to be forgotten." Again, in the same work, he says: "As time never fails, and the universe is eternal, neither the Tanais nor the Nile can have flowed for ever. The places where they rise were once dry, and there is a limit to their operations: but there is none to time. So of all other rivers; they spring up, and they perish; and the sea also continually deserts some lands and invades others. The same tracts, therefore, of the earth are not, some always sea, and others always continents, but everything changes in the course of time."
Aristotle's views on the subject of spontaneous generation were less sound, and his doctrines on this subject exerted a powerful influence for the succeeding twenty centuries. In the long discussion that followed concerning the nature of fossil remains, Aristotle's views were paramount. He believed that animals could originate from moist earth or the slime of rivers, and this seemed to the people of that period a much simpler way of accounting for the remains of animals in the rocks than the marvelous changes of sea and land otherwise required to explain their presence. Aristotle's opinion was in accordance with the Biblical account of the creation of man out of the dust of the earth, and hence more readily obtained credence.
Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle, alludes to fossil fishes found near Heraclea, in Pontus, and in Paphlagonia, and says, "They were either developed from fish-spawn left behind in the earth, or gone astray from rivers or the sea into cavities of the earth, where they had become petrified." In treating of fossil ivory and bones, the same writer supposed them to be produced by a certain plastic virtue latent
- ↑ "Metamorphoses," liber xv., 262.
