EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHERS IN ITALY 



land and among the mountains, that in the quarries 

 of Syracuse the imprints of a fish and of seals had 

 been found, and in Paros the imprint of an anchovy 

 at some depth in the stone, and in Melite shallow 

 impressions of all sorts of sea products. He says that 

 these imprints were made when everything long ago 

 was covered with mud, and then the imprint dried in 

 the mud. Further, he says that all men will be de- 

 stroyed when the earth sinks into the sea and becomes 

 mud, and that the race will begin anew from the be- 

 ginning; and this transformation takes place for all 

 worlds." 7 Here, then, we see this earliest of paleon- 

 tologists studying the fossil-bearing strata of the earth, 

 and drawing from his observations a marvellously 

 scientific induction. Almost two thousand years later 

 another famous citizen of Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, 

 was independently to think out similar conclusions 

 from like observations. But not until the nineteenth 

 century of our era, some twenty-four hundred years 

 after the time of Xenophanes, was the old Greek's 

 doctrine to be accepted by the scientific world. The 

 ideas of Xenophanes were known to his contempora- 

 ries and, as we see, quoted for a few centuries by his 

 successors, then they were ignored or quite forgotten; 

 and if any philosopher of an ensuing age before the 

 time of Leonardo championed a like rational explana- 

 tion of the fossils, we have no record of the fact. The 

 geological doctrine of Xenophanes, then, must be listed 

 among those remarkable Greek anticipations of nine- 

 teenth-century science which suffered almost total 

 eclipse in the intervening centuries. 



Among the pupils of Xenophanes was Parmenides, 



VOL. I. 9 129 



