a time, perhaps in the East and in Egypt,
and that then he settled down to spend the remainder of his life in
Abdera. Whether or not he visited Athens in the course of his wanderings
we do not know. At Abdera he was revered as a sage, but his influence
upon the practical civilization of the time was not marked. He was
pre-eminently a dreamer and a writer. Like his confreres of the
epoch, he entered all fields of thought. He wrote voluminously, but,
unfortunately, his writings have, for the most part, perished. The
fables and traditions of a later day asserted that Democritus had
voluntarily put out his own eyes that he might turn his thoughts inward
with more concentration. Doubtless this is fiction, yet, as usual with
such fictions, it contains a germ of truth; for we may well suppose that
the promulgator of the atomic theory was a man whose mind was attracted
by the subtleties of thought rather than by the tangibilities of
observation. Yet the term "laughing philosopher," which seems to have
been universally applied to Democritus, suggests a mind not altogether
withdrawn from the world of practicalities.

So much for Democritus the man. Let us return now to his theory of
atoms. This theory, it must be confessed, made no very great impression
upon his contemporaries. It found an expositor, a little later, in the
philosopher Epicurus, and later still the poet Lucretius gave it popular
expression. But it seemed scarcely more than the dream of a philosopher
or the vagary of a poet until the day when modern science began to
penetrate the mysteries of matter. When, finally, the researches of
Dalton and his followers had placed the atomic theory on a surer footing
as the foundation of modern chemistry, the ideas of the old laughing
philosopher of Abdera, which all along had been half derisively
remembered, were recalled with a new interest. Now it appeared that
these ideas had curiously foreshadowed nineteenth-century knowledge. It
appeared that away back in the fifth century B.C. a man had dreamed out
a conception of the ultimate nature of matter which had waited all these
centuries for corroboration. And now the historians of philosophy became
more than anxious to do justice to the memory of Democritus.

It is possible that this effort at poetical restitution has carried the
enthusiast too far. There is, indeed, a curious suggestiveness in the
theory of Democritus; there is philosophical allurement in his reduction
of al