A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



day scholarship, however, accepts him as a real per- 

 sonage, though knowing scarcely more of him than 

 that he was the author of the famous theory with 

 which his name was associated. It is suggested that 

 he was a wanderer, like most philosophers of his 

 time, and that later in life he came to Abdera, in 

 Thrace, and through this circumstance became the 

 teacher of Democritus. This fable answers as well 

 as another. What we really know is that Democ- 

 ritus himself, through whose writings and teachings 

 the atomic theory gained vogue, was born in Abdera, 

 about the year 460 B.C. that is to say, just about 

 the time when his great precursor, Anaxagoras, was 

 migrating to Athens. Democritus, like most others 

 of the early Greek thinkers, lives in tradition as a pict- 

 uresque figure. It is vaguely reported that he trav- 

 elled for a time, perhaps in -^he East and in Egypt, and 

 that then he settled down to spend the remainder of his 

 life in Abdera. Whether or not he visited Athens in 

 the course of his wanderings we do not know. At 

 Abdera he was revered as a sage, but his influence upon 

 the practical civilization of the time was not marked. 

 He was pre-eminently a dreamer and a writer. Like 

 his confreres of the epoch, he entered all fields of 

 thought. He wrote voluminously, but, unfortunately, 

 his writings have, for the most part, perished. The 

 fables and traditions of a later day asserted that De- 

 mocritus had voluntarily put out his own eyes that he 

 might turn his thoughts inward with more concentra- 

 tion. Doubtless this is fiction, yet, as usual with 

 such fictions, it contains a germ of truth ; for we may 

 well suppose that the promulgator of the atomic 



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