Some fragments indeed of this pre-Socratic anthropology have come down to us directly; and, wherever they have done so, they show the same curious combination of folk-lore with mature insight, as do the views about non-human nature which are assigned to the same school. The belief, for example,[65] that human beings originated not by animal procreation, but by the operation of trees and rocks on women passing by, hardly differs in kind from the beliefs imputed to the Arunta; and the Hesiodic belief[66] that the men of Aegina were descended from ants, or men in general from stones dropped by Deucalion and Pyrrha,[67] to totemic beliefs or survivals. But the views ascribed to Anaximander, and later to Archelaus, both of Miletus, show something very far in advance of mere folk-lore. The lower animals were commonly believed to have been produced by spontaneous generation, the effect of the sun’s heat on moist earth, slime, or sea water. Anaximander added the descriptive generalization,[68] based on observations on the shores of the sea about Miletus and the Maeander silt, that these lower forms began their cycle of existence ‘encysted in prickly integuments, and then at maturity came out upon drier ground and shed their shells; but still went on living for a short while’. The older belief, as we have seen, was that men too originated in this way, either directly or from some invertebrate form, like the ants of Aegina. But Anaximander pointed out an obvious difficulty, and supplied also a solution of it. ‘Man,’ he said,[69] ‘was produced in the first instance from animals of a different sort’; and this he argued ‘from the fact that the other animals soon get their food for themselves, and Man alone needs a long period of nursing: for which very reason, a creature of this sort could not possibly have survived’. Here we must note first that a special creation of human beings ready made and mature, as Hebrew thinkers conjectured, and Greek poets had devised in the case of Pandora, was unthinkable to an Ionian naturalist, and merely does not come into question; secondly, that a special creation of human beings in infancy is equally ruled out by the fact of the long helplessness of the human infant; thirdly, that the inevitable alternative is accepted without a hint of hesitation, namely, that Mankind must have developed from some other kind of animal, which, though not human, could and did fend for its young during such an infancy as Man’s. Only unacquaintance with the great apes of the tropical world, and very imperfect acquaintance even with imported monkeys, can have prevented Anaximander from assigning to Man his proper place in an evolutionary Order of _Primates_. The other half of our knowledge of Anaximander’s anthropology is even more instructive. ‘It is clear,’ he says,[70] ‘that men were first produced within fishes, and nourished like the “mud fish”--τραφέντας ὤσπερ οἱ πηλαῖοι; and, when they were competent to fend for themselves,