We are naturally curious to know how a man, educated in a Christian country, could have fallen into it.

But it is, in fact, no new discovery, but an old heathen superstition.

Some four hundred years before Christ, when the world had almost wholly apostatized into idolatry, Democritus, among the Greeks, became offended with the vulgar heathen gods, and set himself to invent a plan of the world without them.

From Eastern travelers the Greeks knew that the Brahmins, in India, had a theory of the world developing itself from a primeval egg.
He set himself to refine upon it, and imagined virtually the Nebular Hypothesis.

He said that all matter consisted of very small atoms, dancing about in all directions, from all eternity, and which at last happened into the various forms of the present world.
The ancient Phoenicians held a theory that all life was from the sea; and that, as the wet mud produces all sorts of herbs in spring now, so originally it produced all manner of animals.