GREEK SCIENCE IN EARLY ATTIC PERIOD 



sphere, the other cosmic bodies, including the earth, 

 must be spheres also. But generalizer as he was, An- 

 axagoras was too rigidly scientific a thinker to make 

 this assumption. The data at his command did not, 

 as he analyzed them, seem to point to this conclusion. 

 We have seen that Pythagoras probably, and Par- 

 menides surely, out there in Italy had conceived the 

 idea of the earth's rotundity, but the Pythagorean 

 doctrines were not rapidly taken up in the mother- 

 country, and Parmenides, it must be recalled, was a 

 strict contemporary of Anaxagoras himself. It is no 

 reproach, therefore, to the Clazomenaean philosopher 

 that he should have held to the old idea that the 

 earth is flat, or at most a convex disk the latter be- 

 ing the Babylonian conception which probably domi- 

 nated that Milesian school to which Anaxagoras harked 

 back. 



Anaxagoras may never have seen an eclipse of the 

 moon, and even if he had he might have reflected that, 

 from certain directions, a disk may throw precisely the 

 same shadow as a sphere. Moreover, in reference to 

 the shadow cast by the earth, there was, so Anaxagoras 

 believed, an observation open to him nightly which, 

 we may well suppose, was not without influence in 

 suggesting to his mind the probable shape of the earth. 

 The Milky Way, which doubtless had puzzled astron- 

 omers from the beginnings of history and which was 

 to continue to puzzle them for many centuries after 

 the day of Anaxagoras, was explained by the Clazo- 

 menaean philosopher on a theory obviously suggested 

 by the theory of the moon's phases. Since the earth- 

 like moon shines by reflected light at night, and 



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