hands and feet, condemned to that eternal posture by some
victorious god. The idea spread amongst the smaller nations which
were lit by the civilisation of Babylon and Egypt. Some blended
it with coarse old legends; some, like the Persians and Hebrews,
refined it. The Persians made fire a purer and lighter spirit, so
that the stars would need no support. But everywhere the blue
vault hemmed in the world and the ideas of men. It was so close,
some said, that the birds could reach it. At last the genius of
Greece brooded over the whole chaos of cosmical speculations.

The native tradition of Greece was a little more helpful than the
Babylonian teaching. First was chaos; then the heavier matter
sank to the bottom, forming the disk of the earth, with the ocean
poured round it, and the less coarse matter floated as an
atmosphere above it, and the still finer matter formed an
"aether" above the atmosphere. A remarkably good guess, in its
very broad outline; but the solid firmament still arched the
earth, and the stars were little undying fires in the vault. The
earth itself was small and flat. It stretched (on the modern map)
from about Gibraltar to the Caspian, and from Central
Germany--where the entrance to the lower world was located--to
the Atlas mountains. But all the varied and conflicting culture
of the older empires was now passing into Greece, lighting up in
succession the civilisations of Asia Minor, the Greek islands,
and then Athens and its sister states. Men began to think.

The first genius to have a glimpse of the truth seems to have
been the grave and mystical Pythagorus (born about 582 B.C.). He
taught his little school that the earth was a globe, not a disk,
and that it turned on its axis in twenty-four hours. The earth