is time. The same thing is perhaps true of most
of the great thinkers of this earliest period. But one among them was
remembered in later times as having had a peculiar aversion to the
anthropomorphic conceptions of his fellows. This was Xenophanes, who was
born at Colophon probably about the year 580 B.C., and who, after a life
of wandering, settled finally in Italy and became the founder of the
so-called Eleatic School.

A few fragments of the philosophical poem in which Xenophanes expressed
his views have come down to us, and these fragments include a tolerably
definite avowal of his faith. "God is one supreme among gods and men,
and not like mortals in body or in mind," says Xenophanes. Again he
asserts that "mortals suppose that the gods are born (as they themselves
are), that they wear man's clothing and have human voice and body; but,"
he continues, "if cattle or lions had hands so as to paint with their
hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods
and give them bodies in form like their own--horses like horses, cattle
like cattle." Elsewhere he says, with great acumen: "There has not been
a man, nor will there be, who knows distinctly what I say about the gods
or in regard to all things. For even if one chance for the most part to
say what is true, still he would not know; but every one thinks that he
knows."(6)

In the same spirit Xenophanes speaks of the battles of Titans, of
giants, and of centaurs as "fictions of former ages." All this tells of
the questioning spirit which distinguishes the scientific investigator.
Precisely whither this spirit led him we do not know, but the writers of
a later time have preserved a tradition regarding a belief of Xenophanes
that perhaps entitles him to be considered the father of geology. Thus
Hippolytus records that Xenophanes studied the fossils to be found in
quarries, and drew from their observation remarkable conclusions. His
words are as follows: "Xenophanes believes that once the earth was
mingled with the sea, but in the course of time it became freed from
moisture; and his proofs are such as these: that shells are found in
the midst of the land and among the mountains, that in the quarries
of Syracuse the imprints of a fish and of seals had been found, and
in Paros the imprint of an anchovy at some depth in the stone, and in
Melite shallow impressions of all sorts of sea products. He says that
these imprints were made when everything long