It has commonly been held that the conception of such fabulous hybrid beings rested on a popular belief in a kind of primitive theory of evolution, according to which in an early stage creatures were produced in a mixed form and that gradually order was brought out of this chaotic stage of creation. Berosus[209] in his account of creation according to Babylonian traditions voices this theory, and gives a description of the 'mixed' creatures that marked this earliest period of time, "men with double wings, some with four wings and two faces, some with one body but two heads and having both male and female organs, others with goat's legs and horns, with horses feet, the hind parts of the body like a horse, in front like a man, (i. e., hippocentaurs). There were also bulls with human heads, dogs with four bodies and fish tails, horses with the head of dogs, men and other creatures with heads and bodies of horses but tails of fishes, and various other creatures with the forms of all kinds of animals ... all kinds of marvellous hybrid beings". The description, which is confirmed in part by the Marduk Epic or the 'Babylon' version of creation where we encounter 'scorpion men', 'fish-men', 'goat-fish', dragons and other monstrous beings[210] as the brood of Tiamat the symbol of primaeval chaos, reads like an extract from the birth-omens in the Babylonian-Assyrian handbooks of divination. As a matter of fact, many of the hybrid beings described by Berosus can be parallelled in those parts of the collections that have been published[211].