It will observed that the first four passages stand in substantial agreement with one another, as might be expected from having all been derived from a single source. This work of Theophrastus contained, no doubt, an accurate transcript of the doctrines of Anaximander, since in one instance his very words appear to have been quoted; and as the works of the latter are known to have been in the hands of Apollodorus, there is every reason to suppose that Theophrastus wrote with them lying open before him. When we come to Censorinus, however, we meet with such an absurd and strikingly different version as to leave little doubt that it rests upon a faulty translation of the Greek texts; yet we shall see presently that the majority of modern writers regard this as a faithful rendering of the Milesian's views.
As early as 1819, Heinrich Ritter, to whom we owe the first satisfactory collation of pre-Socratic texts, interpreted Anaximander as having taught that 'after the first imperfect and short-lived creatures had been engendered in slime, an advance took place from the lower to the higher grades of life, until at length man was formed.' Cuvier, whose accuracy and erudition have seldom been called in question, went so far as to attribute to our philosopher the belief that men had been first fish, then reptiles, then mammals, and lastly what they now are. 'This system' he further remarks, 'we find reproduced in times very near to our own, and even in the nineteenth century.' More conservative is the estimate of Sir Charles Lyell, who while admitting that our philosopher 'made at least some slight approach, twenty-five centuries before our time, to the modern doctrine of evolution,' yet denies that he anticipated the Lamarckian theory of progressive development.[1]
Edward Zeller, than whom is no more competent authority, speaks in following wise of Anaximander's evolutionary ideas: "The animals, also, he thought, originated from primitive slime, under the influence of the sun's heat; and as the idea of a gradual succession of animal species corresponding with the periods of geological formation was naturally beyond his reach, he assumed that the land animals, including man, had been at first fishes, and afterwards, when they were able to develop themselves under their new shape, had come on shore and thrown off their scales."[2] Professor Osborn gives practically the same résumé as Zeller, adding, however, that we find in these fragments the 'dim notion of survival or persistence throughout decidedly trying circumstances, which was greatly developed later by Empedocles.' He is unwilling to grant that Anaximander attempted to account for the origin of other land animals, or had any notion of the development of higher from lower organisms, except in the case of man.
