flEIDEL. — OX Fl{A(i.MKNTS Dl' TllK I'liK-SOCRATICS. GS9 



Arist. Hist. Animal. ").1S. 549'' 31 sq. the .spawniii^f of tlio octopu.s 

 and the development of its young are de.seril)e(l. Tliere we read 

 550" 3, TO. ixh ovv Tccv TToXvwoSojv jued' -qijikpas ^tdXiara wePT-qKOPra yiveraL 

 €/c rcov airoppayevTCCv iroXvirodLa, Kal e^epirei, ciaTrep to. 0aXd77ta, iroWa 

 TO ttXtj^os. Profe.ssor Thomp.son in lii.s recent translation renders it 

 thus: "Some fifty days hiter, the eggs hurst and the little polupuses 

 creep out " [itaUcs mine]. In fact there is no reference to the bursting 

 of the eggs. Aristotle's meaning is that that Avhieli develops into the 

 individual polyp l>ecomes detached from the vine-like mass which he 

 has pre\ iously described, and that the young crawl forth (not from 

 the eggs, but) from the hole or vessel in which the spawn was deposited. 

 To return to the cosmology of Anaximander: the words koI el's tlvo-s 

 a.woK\eLadeiar]s kvkXovs refer not specifically to cr(/)aTpa but to 0X6^. 

 The Wal)crl()he by some means, doubtless identical with that which 

 detached the envelope of flame from the euNelope of "air" was segre- 

 gated into a number of annular masses, each like the earth inclosed 

 in an envelope of " air." This segregation is not specifically mentioned 

 but must be inferred; and Ave can guess only at the immediate cause 

 of it. Now it is fairly certain that Anaximander knew the obliquity 

 of the ecliptic or, as the early Greeks .seem regularly to have called it, 

 the inclination or dip of the zodiac or ecliptic. Pliny, as we have 

 seen, attached great significance to its discovery, and so far as we 

 know all the early Greek philosophers regarded it as an actual dipping 

 resulting from some cause subsequently to the origin of the cosmos. 

 Such an event would amply explain the initial break between the 

 respective envelopes of "air" and flame; what caused the subsequent 

 disintegration of the circle of fiame into separate rings we do not 

 know and perhaps it were idle further to speculate. 



V 17, 18. Aet. 5. 19. 4, 'Ava^iiJ.au8pos eu vyp'2 ytvr]dr}vai to. wpoora 

 i'c3a 0XotoTs Teptexofxeva aKavdccdeaL, TrpO'3aLVOvar]s de rfjs riXiKtas 

 airoiSaiveiv ewl to ^rjpOTepov Kal Trepipp-qyvvnevov tov (pXoLOv eir' 

 oXiyov iieTatSiojvaL. 



In y^ "'"* ^ the word xp^^ov was omitted by mistake after eir' oXiyov; 

 his attention ha\ing been called to the omission by me, Diels has re- 

 stored it in v. Orflinarily a fact of this sort would hardly deserve to 

 be noted; but since the false reading has found its way into Kranz's 

 JVort index, s. v. ynTa^iovv, and has been quoted without question by 

 various writers, as e. g. by Otto Gilbert, Die meteoroi. Theorien des gr. 

 Altertums, p. 332, n. 1, and Kinkel, Gesch. der Philos., I. p. 7*, it calls 

 for more than a tacit correction. This is the more necessary because 



