ALEXANDRIAN OR HELLENISTIC PERIOD 



lever with the well-known expression, "Give me a ful- 

 crum on which to rest or a place on which to stand, 

 and I will move the earth." 



But perhaps the feat of all others that most appealed 

 to the imagination of his contemporaries, and possibly 

 also the one that had the greatest bearing upon the 

 position of Archimedes as a scientific discoverer, was 

 the one made familiar through the tale of the crown of 

 Hiero. This crown, so the story goes, was supposed 

 to be made of solid gold, but King Hiero for some rea- 

 son suspected the honesty of the jeweller, and desired 

 to know if Archimedes could devise a way of testing 

 the question without injuring the crown. Greek im- 

 agination seldom spoiled a story in the telling, and 

 in this case the tale was allowed to take on the most 

 picturesque of phases. The philosopher, we are as- 

 sured, pondered the problem for a long time without 

 succeeding, but one day as he stepped into a bath, his 

 attention was attracted by the overflow of water. A 

 new train of ideas was started in his ever-receptive 

 brain. Wild with enthusiasm he sprang from the 

 bath, and, forgetting his robe, dashed along the streets 

 of Syracuse, shouting: "Eureka! Eureka!" (I have 

 found it !) The thought that had come into his mind 

 was this : That any heavy substance must have a bulk 

 proportionate to its weight ; that gold and silver differ 

 in weight, bulk for bulk, and that the way to test the 

 bulk of such an irregular object as a crown was to im- 

 merse it in water. The experiment was made. A 

 lump of pure gold of the weight of the crown was im- 

 mersed in a certain receptacle filled with water, and 

 the overflow noted. Then a lump of pure silver of the 



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