The Story of Evolution | Page 5

lofty masonry. The sun
travelled across its under-surface by day, and went back to the east
during the night through a tunnel in the lower portion of the vault. To
the common folk the priests explained that this framework of the world
was the body of an ancient and disreputable goddess. The god of light
had slit her in two, "as you do a dried fish," they said, and made the
plain of the earth with one half and the blue arch of the heavens with
the other.
So Chaldaea lived out its 5000 years without discovering the universe.
Egypt adopted the idea from more scientific Babylon. Amongst the
fragments of its civilisation we find representations of the firmament as
a goddess, arching over the earth on her hands and feet, condemned to
that eternal posture by some victorious god. The idea spread amongst
the smaller nations which were lit by the civilisation of Babylon and
Egypt. Some blended it with coarse old legends; some, like the Persians
and Hebrews, refined it. The Persians made fire a purer and lighter
spirit, so that the stars would need no support. But everywhere the blue
vault hemmed in the world and the ideas of men. It was so close, some
said, that the birds could reach it. At last the genius of Greece brooded
over the whole chaos of cosmical speculations.
The native tradition of Greece was a little more helpful than the
Babylonian teaching. First was chaos; then the heavier matter sank to
the bottom, forming the disk of the earth, with the ocean poured round
it, and the less coarse matter floated as an atmosphere above it, and the
still finer matter formed an "aether" above the atmosphere. A
remarkably good guess, in its very broad outline; but the solid
firmament still arched the earth, and the stars were little undying fires
in the vault. The earth itself was small and flat. It stretched (on the
modern map) from about Gibraltar to the Caspian, and from Central
Germany--where the entrance to the lower world was located--to the

Atlas mountains. But all the varied and conflicting culture of the older
empires was now passing into Greece, lighting up in succession the
civilisations of Asia Minor, the Greek islands, and then Athens and its
sister states. Men began to think.
The first genius to have a glimpse of the truth seems to have been the
grave and mystical Pythagorus (born about 582 B.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.
By sheer speculation Greece was well on the way of discovery. Then
the mists of philosophy fell between the mind of Greece and nature,
and the notions of Democritus were rejected with disdain; and then,
very speedily, the decay of the brilliant nation put an end to its feverish
search for truth. Greek culture passed to Alexandria, where it met the
remains of the culture of Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia, and one more
remarkable effort was made to penetrate the outlying universe before
the night of the Middle Ages fell on the old world.
Astronomy was ardently studied at Alexandria, and was fortunately
combined with an assiduous study of mathematics. Aristarchus (about
320-250 B.C.) calculated that the sun was 84,000,000 miles away; a
vast expansion of the solar system and, for the time, a remarkable

approach to the real figure (92,000,000) Eratosthenes (276-196 B.C.)
made an extremely good calculation of the size of the earth, though he
held it to be the centre of a small universe.