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 (op. cit.
page 81.), 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 (op. cit. page 87.), "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
intermediate species may once have linked those that now seem