HOW THE EARTH WAS REGARDED. 



547 



were obliged to imagine a system of tunnels that gradually became 

 enlarged to the intervals between the pillars." 



The Hindoos held the earth to be hemispherical, and to be sup- 

 ported like a boat turned upside down upon the heads of four ele- 

 phants, which stood on the back of an immense tortoise. It is usually 

 said that the tortoise rested on nothing, but the Hindoos maintained 

 that it floated on the surface of the universal ocean. The learned 

 Hindoos, however, say that these animals were merely symbolical, 

 the four elephants meaning the four directions of the compass, and 

 the tortoise meaning eternity. The idea that the earth floated long 

 prevailed, and was adopted by Thales, the early Greek philosopher, 

 and by Seneca several centuries later. 



Anaximander, a philosopher of the sixth century before Christ, 

 represented the earth as a cylinder, the upper face alone of which is 

 inhabited. He computed its proportions, and stated that it is one- 

 third as high as its diameter ; and he declared that it floats freely in 



Fig. 8. The Earth of the Later Greeks. 



the centre of the celestial vault, because there is no reason why it 

 should move to one side rather than to the other. Leucippus, De- 

 mocritus, Heraclitus, and Anaxagoras, all agreed with him, and Anax- 

 imenes added the opinion, in consequence of the importance of air in 

 the world, that the earth is supported on compressed air. 



Plato was a mathematician, and excogitated the universe out of 

 the depths of his geometrical consciousness. In explaining how 

 things came about, he said that matter in itself had no form or proper- 

 ties, but God in the beginning invested it with a sort of triangular 

 constitution. Afterward, taking a certain number of these primitive 

 triangles, be composed the four primary elements. Fire, the most 

 subtile, is made up of the smallest number of triangles, and has the 

 figure of a pyramid. Water-particles are solids of twenty faces, 

 while the earth-element is cubical or bounded by right-angled tri- 

 angles. The cube with its six equal faces appeared to Plato to be 

 the most perfect of solids, and therefore most suitable for the earth, 

 which was to stand in the centre of the universe. 



