CH. I. SCIENCE OF THE GREEKS. 



CHAPTER I. 



639 TO 470 B.C. 



Ignorance of the Greeks concerning Nature Ionian School of Learn- 

 ing Thales Anaximander Pythagoras True Sayings of Pytha- 

 goras and his Followers about Geology. 



ABOUT 600 years before Christ was born, the Greeks were 

 the most learned people in Europe. They were naturally 

 a handsome and clever race, and their young men were 

 trained to be both good soldiers and good scholars. An 

 English boy, if he could be carried back to those days, 

 would find that the young Greeks could read, write, draw, 

 and argue as well as himself, and probably that they could 

 leap, wrestle, and run better than himself or any of his 

 schoolfellows. 



But on some points he would find that their ideas were 

 very strange. If he spoke to them of -the world as a round 

 globe they would stare in astonishment, and tell him that 

 such an idea was absurd, for everyone knew that the world 

 was flat, with the sea flowing all round it. If he asked them, 

 in his turn, about Mount Etna, they would surprise him by 

 replying that the god Vulcan had his smithy underneath the 

 mountain, where he was forging thunderbolts for Jove, and 

 that Etna was the chimney of his forge. But if he spoke of 

 the sun as a globe of light, they would turn away from him 

 in horror as a wicked unbeliever in the gods, for who among 

 the Greeks did not know that the sun was the god Helios, 



