GREEK SCIENCE IN EARLY ATTIC PERIOD 



Notwithstanding the loss of the greater part of the 

 writings of Anaxagoras, however, a tolerably precise 

 account of his scientific doctrines is accessible. Dioge- 

 nes Laertius expresses some of them in very clear and 

 precise terms. We have already pointed out the un- 

 certainty that attaches to such evidence as this, but it 

 is as valid for Anaxagoras as for another. If we reject 

 such evidence, we shall often have almost nothing left ; 

 in accepting it we may at least feel certain that we are 

 viewing the thinker as his contemporaries and imme- 

 diate successors viewed him. Following Diogenes, 

 then, we shall find some remarkable scientific opinions 

 ascribed to Anaxagoras. "He asserted," we are told, 

 " that the sun was a mass of burning iron, greater than 

 Peloponnesus, and that the moon contained houses 

 and also hills and ravines." In corroboration of this, 

 Plato represents him as having conjectured the right 

 explanation of the moon's light, and of the solar and 

 lunar eclipses. He had other astronomical theories 

 that were more fanciful; thus "he said that the stars 

 originally moved about in irregular confusion, so that 

 at first the pole-star, which is continually visible, al- 

 ways appeared in the zenith, but that afterwards it ac- 

 quired a certain declination, and that the Milky Way 

 was a reflection of the light of the sun when the stars 

 did not appear. The comets he considered to be a 

 concourse of planets emitting rays, and the shooting- 

 stars he thought were sparks, as it were, leaping from 

 the firmament." 



Much of this is far enough from the truth, as we now 

 know it, yet all of it shows an earnest endeavor to ex- 

 plain the observed phenomena of the heavens on ra- 



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