We now come to the great Stagirite, Aristotle, founder of the experimental school and father of natural history. Born in 384 B. C., he entered the Academy under Plato when a boy of eighteen. When he was thirty-six Plato died, and Aristotle then left Athens. At forty-one he became the teacher of Alexander the Great. He was the greatest of all the Greeks, and his studies took a wider range than had been embraced by any previous thinker. Stageira, where he spent his boyhood, was on the Strynomid gulf, and here he observed the variations and gradations between marine plants and animals. It is an evidence of his keen insight that he classified the sponge as an animal. Compare this with Agassiz, the opponent of Darwinism, who, in the 19th century, declared the sponge to be a vegetable. Aristotle insisted on observation and experience as the foundation of knowledge. “We must not accept a general principle from logic only, but must prove its application to each fact. For it is in facts we must seek general principles, and these must always accord with facts.” He repudiated the idea of purpose in nature, saying, “Jupiter rains not that corn may be increased, but from necessity.” He came very near Von Mohl’s protoplasm when he said, “Germs should have been first produced, and not immediately animals; and that soft mass which first subsisted was the germ.” Passing over the much misrepresented Epicurus we come two centuries later to the illustrious Roman poet philosopher, Lucretius. In this last century preceeding the Christian era, Greece had fallen from her high estate and become a Roman province. But while Rome had annexed Greece, Greek learning had conquered the Roman mind. Lucretius in his poem, “The System of Nature,” expounds, with great force, the atomic theory of his Greek forerunners. The first anthropologist, he comes so near to Spencer and Tylor that his ideas, and sometimes even his sentences smack of the 19th century. “The past history of man” he asserts, “lies in no heroic or golden age, but in one struggle out of savagery.” Of the origin of language he says, “Nature impelled them to utter the various sounds of the tongue, and use struck out the names of things.” Of the early struggles of primitive men he says, “Man’s first arms were hands, nails and teeth and stones and boughs broken off from the forests, and flame and fire, as soon as they had become known. Afterward the force of iron and copper was discovered, and the use of copper was known before that of iron, as its nature is easier to work, and it is found in greater quantity. With copper they would labor the soil of the earth and stir up the billows of war. Then by slow steps the sword of iron gained ground and the make of the copper sickle became a byword.” The name of Lucretius closes the long line of the evolutionary pioneers of the ancient world. There the golden vein ceases so far as thinking is concerned, not to reappear until many centuries have passed.