ANAXIMANDER.

Anaximander (about 611–547 B.C.), a contemporary and fellow-citizen of Thales, was a remarkably original thinker. He was the first Greek philosopher who ventured to put forward his views in a formal written treatise. This was a work About Nature and was not given to the world till he was about sixty-four years old. His originality is illustrated by his theory of evolution. According to him animals first arose from slime evaporated by the sun; they lived in the sea and had prickly coverings; men at first resembled fishes.

But his astronomical views were not less remarkable. Anaximander boldly maintained that the earth is in the centre of the universe, suspended freely and without support, whereas Thales regarded it as resting on the water and Anaximenes as supported by the air. It remains in its position, said Anaximander, because it is at an equal distance from all the rest of the heavenly bodies. The earth was, according to him, cylinder-shaped, round “like a stone pillar”; one of its two plane faces is that on which we stand; its depth is one-third of its breadth.

Anaximander postulated as his first principle, not water (like Thales) or any of the elements, but the Infinite; this was a substance, not further defined, from which all the heavens and the worlds in them were produced; according to him the worlds themselves were infinite in number, and there were always some worlds coming into being and others passing away ad infinitum. The origin of the stars, and their nature, he explained as follows. “That which is capable of begetting the hot and the cold out of the eternal was separated off during the coming into being of our world, and from the flame thus produced a sort of sphere was made which grew round the air about the earth as the bark round the tree; then this sphere was torn off and became enclosed in certain circles or rings, and thus were formed the sun, the moon and the stars.” “The stars are produced as a circle of fire, separated off from the fire in the universe and enclosed by air. They have as vents certain pipe-shaped passages at which the stars are seen.” “The stars are compressed portions of air, in the shape of wheels filled with fire, and they emit flames at some point from small openings.” “The stars are borne round by the circles in which they are enclosed.” “The sun is a circle twenty-eight times (v. l. 27 times) the size of the earth; it is like a wheel of a chariot the rim of which is hollow and full of fire and lets the fire shine out at a certain point in it through an opening like the tube of a blow-pipe; such is the sun.” “The sun is equal to the earth.” “The eclipses of the sun occur through the opening by which the fire finds vent being shut up.” “The moon is a circle nineteen times the size of the earth; it is similar to a chariot-wheel the rim of which is hollow and full of fire like the circle of the sun, and it is placed obliquely like the other; it has one vent like the tube of a blow-pipe; the eclipses of the moon depend on the turnings of the wheel.” “The moon is eclipsed when the opening in the rim of the wheel is stopped up.” “The moon appears sometimes as waxing, sometimes as waning, to an extent corresponding to the closing or opening of the passages.” “The sun is placed highest of all, after it the moon, and under them the fixed stars and the planets.”

It has been pointed out that the idea of the formation of tubes of compressed air within which the fire of each star is shut up except for the one opening through which the flame shows (like a gas-jet, as it were) is not unlike Laplace’s hypothesis with reference to the origin of Saturn’s rings. In any case it is a sufficiently original conception.

When Anaximander says that the hoops carrying the sun and moon “lie obliquely,” this is no doubt an attempt to explain, in addition to the daily rotation, the annual movement of the sun and the monthly movement of the moon.

We have here too the first speculation about the sizes and distances of the heavenly bodies. The sun is as large as the earth. The ambiguity between the estimates of the size of the sun’s circle as twenty-seven or twenty-eight times the size of the earth suggests that it is a question between taking the inner and outer circumferences of the sun’s ring respectively, and a similar ambiguity may account for the circle of the moon being stated to be nineteen times, not eighteen times, the size of the earth. No estimate is given of the distance of the planets from the earth, but as, according to Anaximander, they are nearer to the earth than the sun and moon are, it is possible that, if a figure had been stated, it would have been nine times the size of the earth, in which case we should have had the numbers 9, 18, 27, three terms in arithmetical progression and all of them multiples of 9, the square of 3. It seems probable that these figures were not arrived at by any calculation based on geometrical considerations, but that we have here merely an illustration of the ancient cult of the sacred numbers 3 and 9. Three is the sacred number in Homer, 9 in Theognis. The cult of 3 and its multiples 9 and 27 is found among the Aryans, then among the Finns and Tartars and then again among the Etruscans. Therefore Anaximander’s figures probably say little more than what the Indians tell us, namely, that three Vishnu-steps reach from earth to heaven.

Anaximander is said to have been the first to discover the gnomon (or sun-dial with a vertical needle). This is, however, incorrect, for Herodotus says that the Greeks learnt the use of the gnomon and the polos from the Babylonians. Anaximander may have been the first to introduce the gnomon into Greece. He is said to have set it up in Sparta and to have shown on it “the solstices, the times, the seasons, and the equinox”.

But Anaximander has another title to fame. He was the first who ventured to draw a map of the inhabited earth. The Egyptians indeed had drawn maps before, but only of special districts. Anaximander boldly planned out the whole world with “the circumference of the earth and of the sea”. Hecataeus, a much-travelled man, is said to have corrected Anaximander’s map so that it became the object of general admiration.