The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

Around 1260 Albert Magnus, the first modern European to study Aristotle’s zoology, expressed Aristotle’s claim that ‘nature proceeds . . . by such small steps’ in much the same terms that he did: ‘nature does not make [animal] kinds separate without making something intermediate between them; for nature does not pass from extreme to extreme nisi per medium’. By the early seventeenth century the obverse version, Natura non facit saltum (or saltus – plural), was a commonplace. In his Philosophia botanica, 1751, Linnaeus elevated it to methodological principle. ‘This is first and foremost what is required in Botany – Nature does not make jumps.’ Perhaps that is what Darwin was remembering when he quoted it.