PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



example, shrewd as are some of the guesses made 

 by Anaximander, we find him describing the sun as 

 ' a ring twenty-eight times the size of the earth, like 

 a cart-wheel with the felloe hollow and full of fire, 

 showing the fire at a certain point, as if through the 

 nozzle of a pair of bellows/ And if he made some 

 approach to truer ideas of the earth's shape as 'con- 

 vex and round ' ; the world of his day, as in the 

 days of Homer, thought of it as flat, and as floating 

 on the all-surrounding water. The Ionian philoso- 

 phers lacked not insight, but the scientific method 

 of starting with working hypotheses, or of observation 

 before theory or conjecture, was as yet unborn. 



In this brief survey of the subject there will be 

 no advantage in detailing the various speculations 

 which followed on the heels 'of those of Thales 

 and Anaximander, since these varied only in non- 

 essentials ; or which, like that of Pythagoras and 

 his school, regarded by Zeller as an outcome of the 

 teaching of Anaximander, were purely abstract and 

 fanciful. " As is well known, the Pythagoreans, whose 

 philosophy was ethical as well as cosmical, held that 

 all things are made of numbers, each of which was 

 credited with special character and property. A 

 belief in such symbols as entities seems impossible 

 to us, but its existence in early thought is conceiv- 

 able, when, as Aristotle says, they were * not separated 

 from the objects of sense.' Even at the present 

 day, among the eccentric people who believe in the 

 modern sham-Gnosticism known as Theosophy, and 

 in Astrology, we find the delusion that numbers 

 possess inherent magic or mystic virtues. So far 

 as the ancients are concerned, ' consider the lively 



