C.). He
taught his little school that the earth was a globe, not a disk,
and that it turned on its axis in twenty-four hours. The earth
and the other planets were revolving round the central fire of
the system; but the sun was a reflection of this central fire,
not the fire itself. Even Pythagoras, moreover, made the heavens
a solid sphere revolving, with its stars, round the central fire;
and the truth he discovered was mingled with so much mysticism,
and confined to so small and retired a school, that it was
quickly lost again. In the next generation Anaxagoras taught that
the sun was a vast globe of white-hot iron, and that the stars
were material bodies made white-hot by friction with the ether. A
generation later the famous Democritus came nearer than any to
the truth. The universe was composed of an infinite number of
indestructible particles, called "atoms," which had gradually
settled from a state of chaotic confusion to their present
orderly arrangement in large masses. The sun was a body of
enormous size, and the points of light in the Milky Way were
similar suns at a tremendous distance from the earth. Our
universe, moreover, was only one of an infinite number of
universes, and an eternal cycle of destruction and re-formation
was running through these myriads of worlds.
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