st expanse of Heaven." (Rousseau, On the Origins of Inequality) (12) In the third epistle of Alexander Popes Essay on Man ( 1733-1734) there is a hint of the evolutionary theory, along with man's common origin with the animal world, although it is extremely difficult to determine whether he is endorsing the idea of man's descent from animals, or merely affirming that all beings were created from like, humble elements. The French Philosopher Montesquieu described his belief that all present species had descended from a relatively few number of ancient species.Maillet (1656-1738), the French Consul and philosopher of note, preceded Darwin by well over a century with his theory that the land animals developed from creatures that formerly lived in the ocean depths. In his Telliamed he wrote that life first began with aquatic beings that had to "terrestrialise" themselves as the land appeared out of the water. He believed that there were two kinds of ocean animals, those that swam near the surface and those that lived on the ocean bottom. Maillet claimed that those that lived near the bottom became the walking animals. He proposed that those marine animals that swam near the surface turned into birds since, during the course of time, they were thrown up on the land by the waves of the sea, consequently they had to learn to fly since the tall grass on the beach prevented them from returning to the water, thus their fins split into wings and feet. One of the main premises of his theory is that descent occurs with slight modification over the span of many generations, nearly identical with Darwin's ideas a century later.The philosopher Maurpertius (1698-1759) definitely elucidated the very essentials of the Darwinian theory of evolution many years before Darwin was even born, proposing that it took place by the same process of survival of the fittest through chance favorable variations, which he called "errors" (and which modern evolutionists c...
