They worshiped it as a god, and called it Mot, or Mud.

Anaximander took up the theory and carried it out in true Darwinian style, alleging that the first men sprang from the ground watered by the sea, and that they had spines like sea urchins; evidently deriving them from the Radiates.

Lucretius still further developed the theory in a poem in six books.

The spread of Christianity, however, hindered the spread of the doctrine, as Mr.
Tyndall feelingly laments, until the Saracens overspread the East, when some of them, it seems, favored it.

But it seems to be an unlucky dogma, since, with the downfall of the power of the false prophet, the anti-Christian form of science went down again.
The dogma of the transmutation of species reappeared, however, in the Romish Church in a religious form; the old heathenism, which had never been wholly banished from the minds of men, thus reasserting itself.
About the tenth century some began to teach that the bread of the communion of the Lord's Supper was transubstantiated, and the wine also, into the body, and blood, and soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ.