a cylinder, or rather as a truncated cone, the
upper end of which is the habitable portion. This conception is perhaps
the first of these guesses through which the Greek mind attempted to
explain the apparent fixity of the earth. To ask what supports the earth
in space is most natural, but the answer given by Anaximander, like that
more familiar Greek solution which transformed the cone, or cylinder,
into the giant Atlas, is but another illustration of that substitution
of unwarranted inference for scientific induction which we have already
so often pointed out as characteristic of the primitive stages of
thought.

Anaximander held at least one theory which, as vouched for by various
copyists and commentators, entitles him to be considered perhaps the
first teacher of the idea of organic evolution. According to this idea,
man developed from a fishlike ancestor, "growing up as sharks do until
able to help himself and then coming forth on dry land."(1) The thought
here expressed finds its germ, perhaps, in the Babylonian conception
that everything came forth from a chaos of waters. Yet the fact that the
thought of Anaximander has come down to posterity through such various
channels suggests that the Greek thinker had got far enough away from
the Oriental conception to make his view seem to his contemporaries a
novel and individual one. Indeed, nothing we know of the Oriental line
of thought conveys any suggestion of the idea of transformation of
species, whereas that idea is distinctly formulated in the traditional
views of Anaximander.

VI. THE EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHERS IN ITALY

Diogenes Laertius tells a story about a youth who, clad in a purple
toga, entered the arena at the Olympian games and asked to compete
with the other youths in boxing. He was derisively denied admission,
presumably because he was beyond the legitimate age for juvenile
contestants. Nothing daunted, the youth entered the lists of men, and
turned the laugh on his critics by coming off victor. The youth who
performed this feat was named Pythagoras. He was the same man, if we
may credit the story, who afterwards migrated to Italy and became
the founder of the famous Crotonian School of Philosophy; the man who
developed the religion of the Orphic mysteries; who conceived the
idea of the music of the spheres; who promulgated the doctrine of
metempsychosis; who first, perhaps, of all men clearly conceived the
notion that this world on which we l