ago was covered with mud,
and then the imprint dried in the mud. Further, he says that all men
will be destroyed when the earth sinks into the sea and becomes mud,
and that the race will begin anew from the beginning; and this
transformation takes place for all worlds."(7) Here, then, we see this
earliest of paleontologists studying the fossil-bearing strata of the
earth, and drawing from his observations a marvellously scientific
induction. Almost two thousand years later another famous citizen
of Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, was independently to think out similar
conclusions from like observations. But not until the nineteenth century
of our era, some twenty-four hundred years after the time of Xenophanes,
was the old Greek's doctrine to be accepted by the scientific world.
The ideas of Xenophanes were known to his contemporaries and, as we see,
quoted for a few centuries by his successors, then they were ignored
or quite forgotten; and if any philosopher of an ensuing age before the
time of Leonardo championed a like rational explanation of the fossils,
we have no record of the fact. The geological doctrine of Xenophanes,
then, must be listed among those remarkable Greek anticipations of
nineteenth-century science which suffered almost total eclipse in the
intervening centuries.

Among the pupils of Xenophanes was Parmenides, the thinker who was
destined to carry on the work of his master along the same scientific
lines, though at the same time mingling his scientific conceptions with
the mysticism of the poet. We have already had occasion to mention that
Parmenides championed the idea that the earth is round; noting also that
doubts exist as to whether he or Pythagoras originated this doctrine.
No explicit answer to this question can possibly be hoped for. It seems
clear, however, that for a long time the Italic School, to which both
these philosophers belonged, had a monopoly of the belief in question.
Parmenides, like Pythagoras, is credited with having believed in the
motion of the earth, though the evidence furnished by the writings
of the philosopher himself is not as demonstrative as one could wish.
Unfortunately, the copyists of a later age were more concerned with
metaphysical speculations than with more tangible things. But as far as
the fragmentary references to the ideas of Parmenides may be accepted,
they do not support the idea of the earth's motion. Indeed, Parmenides
is made to say explicitly, in preserv