germs should have been first produced, and not immediately animals; and that soft mass which first subsisted was the germ. In plants, also, there is purpose, but it is less distinct; and this shows that plants were produced in the same manner as animals, not by chance, as by the union of olives with grape vines. Similarly, it may be argued, that there should be an accidental generation of the germs of things, but he who asserts this subverts Nature herself, for Nature produces those things which, being continually moved by a certain principle contained in themselves, arrive at a certain end." In the eagerness of theologians to discover proof of a belief in one God among the old philosophers, the references made by Aristotle to a "perfecting principle," an "efficient cause," a "prime mover," and so forth, have been too readily construed as denoting a monotheistic creed which, reminding us of the "one god" of Xenophanes, is also akin to the Personal God of Christianity. "The Stagirite," as Mr. Benn remarks (Greek Philosophers, vol. i, p. 312), "agrees with Catholic theism, and he agrees with the First Article of the English Church, though not with the Pentateuch, in saying that God is without parts or passions, but there his agreement ceases. Excluding such a thing as divine interference with all Nature, his theology, of course, excludes the possibility of revelation, inspiration, miracles, and grace." He is a being who does not interest himself in human affairs. But, differ as the commentators may as to Aristotle's meaning, his assumed place in the orthodox line led, as will be seen hereafter, to the acceptance of his philosophy by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in the fourth century, and by other Fathers of the Church, so that the mediæval theories of the Bible, blended with Aristotle, represent the sum of knowledge held as sufficient until the discoveries of Copernicus in the sixteenth century upset the Ptolemaic theory with its fixed earth and system of cycles and epicycles in which the heavenly bodies moved. He thereby upset very much besides. Like Anaximander and others, Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation, although only in the case of certain animals, as of eels from the mud of ponds, and of insects from putrid matter. However, in this, both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and many men of science down to the latter part of the seventeenth century, followed him. For example, Van Helmont, an experimental chemist of that period, gave a recipe for making fleas; and another scholar showed himself on a level with the unlettered rustics of to-day, who believe that eels are produced from horse hairs thrown into a pond.