A History of Evolution by Carroll Lane Fenton

The earliest known books on natural history, and particularly on zoology, the science of animals, were those written by the ancient Greeks. We are certain that still more ancient volumes once existed, for the Greek writers commonly referred to "the ancients," very much as authors of today refer to the Greeks. But who these ancients were, where they lived, and what they wrote, we have no means of knowing; for all practical purposes the study of animal life may be considered to have originated in Greece during the seventh century before the Christian era.

Never, perhaps, has a talented people been so advantageously situated with relation to a stimulating environment as were the Greeks. All about them was a sea teeming with low and primitive forms of life, stimulating them to the observation of nature. Their earliest philosophies were philosophies of nature, of the beginnings and causes of the universe and its inhabitants. Of course, as has been pointed out by various students of philosophy, the Greeks did not follow truly scientific methods of thought; they aimed directly at a theory without stopping to search for a mass of facts to suggest and support it. Neither, for that matter, can they justly be called scientists or naturalists; rather, they were poets and philosophers, and their evident failures to understand the problems which they attacked are quite to be expected. As has been said, they sought the theory before they searched for the fact, and having attained it they interpreted all facts in the light of the theory. And if that was wrong -- as it very often was -- the whole thing was wrong, because only the theory was studied and no one knew anything about the mistake.