ar too close an examination, yet it is true that
no extensive prose compositions of an earlier day than this have
been preserved, though numerous others are known by their fragments.
Herodotus, "the father of prose," was a slightly younger contemporary of
the Clazomenaean philosopher; not unlikely the two men may have met at
Athens.

Notwithstanding the loss of the greater part of the writings of
Anaxagoras, however, a tolerably precise account of his scientific
doctrines is accessible. Diogenes Laertius expresses some of them
in very clear and precise terms. We have already pointed out the
uncertainty that attaches to such evidence as this, but it is as valid
for Anaxagoras as for another. If we reject such evidence, we shall
often have almost nothing left; in accepting it we may at least feel
certain that we are viewing the thinker as his contemporaries and
immediate successors viewed him. Following Diogenes, then, we shall
find some remarkable scientific opinions ascribed to Anaxagoras. "He
asserted," we are told, "that the sun was a mass of burning iron,
greater than Peloponnesus, and that the moon contained houses and also
hills and ravines." In corroboration of this, Plato represents him as
having conjectured the right explanation of the moon's light, and of the
solar and lunar eclipses. He had other astronomical theories that were
more fanciful; thus "he said that the stars originally moved about
in irregular confusion, so that at first the pole-star, which is
continually visible, always appeared in the zenith, but that afterwards
it acquired a certain declination, and that the Milky Way was a
reflection of the light of the sun when the stars did not appear. The
comets he considered to be a concourse of planets emitting rays, and
the shooting-stars he thought were sparks, as it were, leaping from the
firmament."

Much of this is far enough from the truth, as we now know it, yet all
of it shows an earnest endeavor to explain the observed phenomena of the
heavens on rational principles. To have predicated the sun as a great
molten mass of iron was indeed a wonderful anticipation of the results
of the modern spectroscope. Nor can it be said that this hypothesis of
Anaxagoras was a purely visionary guess. It was in all probability a
scientific deduction from the observed character of meteoric stones.
Reference has already been made to the alleged prediction of the fall
of the famous meteor at aegespotomi by Anaxago