WHAT THIS WORLD IS MADE OF 



IN the wide days of old Greece, philosophers seemed 

 to grow under every tree. They speculated on ev- 

 erything betwixt heaven and earth, and it was a 

 matter of course that they puzzled deeply over 

 what this world is made of. 



Some of their guesses were fantastic in the ex- 

 treme. That of Aristotle, who was long accounted 

 the wisest man of antiquity, may be cited as an 

 example. Aristotle taught that everything is com- 

 pounded of hot and cold, wet and dry. Hot + dry 

 made fire, hot + wet formed the air, cold -f dry the 

 earth, and cold + wet, water the four elements. 

 Fuddle-duddle like this served men's minds for 

 food through more than two thousand years, and 

 down even to the days of Shakespeare and Bacon. 



There were in the ancient days a few, like De- 

 mocritus and Lucretius, who, reasoning closely on 

 the things they saw, conceived the world as made 

 up of the helter-skelter play of minute particles 

 the atoms. The facts they had to go on were scant, 

 and their ideas, if ingenious, amounted to little 



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