Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley

"[...]of infancy involves dependence on the parents, and evolves the sympathy which lies at the base of social relations. (Cf. Fiske’s Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii, pp. 344, 360.) In dealing with speculations so remote, we have to guard against reading modern meanings into writings produced in ages whose limitations of knowledge were serious, and whose temper and standpoint are wholly alien to our own. For example, shrewd as are some of the guesses made by Anaximander, we find him describing the sun as “a ring twenty-eight times the size of the earth, like a cartwheel with the felloe hollow and full of fire,[...]".