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It is not strange that among these should come, now and then, some one who in some passage or other should show that there had come to his mind at least a glimmer of the thought that was later to develop into the great idea which the modern world calls evolution. Among the earliest of these was Anaximander, who lived 600 years before Christ. He thought that the earth was at first a fluid.

No scientific treatise can begin without assuming Matter and Force as data, and however much we may have learned about the relations of forces and the affinities of things, Matter and Force as such remain very much the same dim infinities, that the originative 'Infinite' was to Anaximander.

The primary Being is a unity, one in all, comprising within itself the multiplicity of elements from which all mundane things are composed. It is only in infinity that the perpetual changes of things can take place. Thus Anaximander, an original but vague thinker, prepared the way for Pythagoras.

But the supposed discoveries that were made in the eighteenth, and even in the latter part of the seventeenth century, purporting to ascertain the precise distance of the sun, the planets, and even of the fixed stars, are matters entirely distinct from this. Among the earliest astronomers of Greece were Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Anaxagoras.

Anaximander says, that the sun is a circle eight and twenty times bigger than the earth, and has a circumference very much like that of a chariot-wheel, which is hollow and full of fire; the fire of which appears to us through its mouth, as by an aperture in a pipe; and this is the sun.

Two of the Milesians, disciples of Anaximander and Anaximenes, were staying then in Egypt, to study astronomy and the peculiar wisdom of the Egyptians at Heliopolis, and the third was a wealthy merchant and ship- owner, named Theopompus, who had settled at Naukratis.

His conjectures are usually shrewd and keen; and sometimes, as in his assertion, "that the moon shone in light borrowed from the sun," may deserve a higher praise. Both Anaximander and Pherecydes concurred in the principles of their doctrines, but the latter seems to have more distinctly asserted the immortality of the soul.

ANAXIMANDER. A fine but much foreshortened ring-plain, 39 miles in diameter, abutting on the E. side of J.F.W. Herschel. It has a large crater on its W. border, which is common to the two formations, and a very prominent crater, both on the S. and N. The barrier on the S.W. rises to a height of nearly 10,000 feet. Schmidt shows a crater and other details on the floor. EAST LONGITUDE 60 deg.

Nothing, considered in the light of a raw material, is a most decided failure. It follows, then, that a god must have made the universe out of himself, he being the only existence. The universe is material, and if it was made of god, the god must have been material. With this very thought in his mind, Anaximander of Miletus said: "Creation is the decomposition of the infinite."

Here again the influence of Babylonian science upon the germinating Western thought is suggested. It is said that Anaximander departed from Thales's conception of the earth, and, it may be added, from the Babylonian conception also, in that he conceived it as a cylinder, or rather as a truncated cone, the upper end of which is the habitable portion.