A RETROSPECTIVE GLANCE 



our eye falls upon Asia Minor and its outlying islands, 

 we reflect that here were born such men as Thales, 

 Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, 

 Anaxagoras, Socrates, Aristarchus, Hipparchus, Eu- 

 doxus, Philolaus, and Galen. From the northern 

 shores of the ^Egean came Lucippus, Democritus, and 

 Aristotle. Italy, off to the west, is the home of 

 Pythagoras and Xenophanes in their later years, and 

 of Parmenides and Empedocles, Zeno, and Archimedes. 

 Northern Africa can claim, by birth or by adoption, 

 such names as Euclid, Apollonius of Perga, Heroph- 

 ilus, Erasistratus, Aristippus, Eratosthenes, Ctesibius, 

 Hero, Strabo, and Ptolemy. This is but running over 

 the list of great men whose discoveries have claimed 

 our attention. Were we to extend the list to include 

 a host of workers of the second rank, we should but 

 emphasize the same fact. 



All along we are speaking of Greeks, or, as they call 

 themselves, Hellenes, and we mean by these words the 

 people whose home was a small jagged peninsula 

 jutting into the Mediterranean at the southeastern 

 extremity of Europe. We think of this peninsula 

 as the home of Greek culture, yet of all the great 

 thinkers we have just named, not one was born on 

 this peninsula, and perhaps not one in five ever set 

 foot upon it. In point of fact, one Greek thinker of the 

 very first rank, and one only, was born in Greece 

 proper; that one, however, was Plato, perhaps the 

 greatest of them all. With this one brilliant exception 

 (and even he was born of parents who came from 

 the provinces), all the great thinkers of Greece had 

 their origin at the circumference rather than the centre 

 VOL. I.-IQ 289 



