The man who had studied the meteorite of aegospotami, and been put by it on the track of such remarkable inductions, was, naturally, not oblivious to the other phenomena of the atmosphere. Indeed, such a mind as that of Anaxagoras was sure to investigate all manner of natural phenomena, and almost equally sure to throw new light on any subject that it investigated. Hence it is not surprising to find Anaxagoras credited with explaining the winds as due to the rarefactions of the atmosphere produced by the sun. This explanation gives Anaxagoras full right to be called "the father of meteorology," a title which, it may be, no one has thought of applying to him, chiefly because the science of meteorology did not make its real beginnings until some twenty-four hundred years after the death of its first great votary. Not content with explaining the winds, this prototype of Franklin turned his attention even to the tipper atmosphere. "Thunder," he is reputed to have said, "was produced by the collision of the clouds, and lightning by the rubbing together of the clouds." We dare not go so far as to suggest that this implies an association in the mind of Anaxagoras between the friction of the clouds and the observed electrical effects generated by the friction of such a substance as amber. To make such a suggestion doubtless would be to fall victim to the old familiar propensity to read into Homer things that Homer never knew. Yet the significant fact remains that Anaxagoras ascribed to thunder and to lightning their true position as strictly natural phenomena. For him it was no god that menaced humanity with thundering voice and the flash of his divine fires from the clouds. Little wonder that the thinker whose science carried him to such scepticism as this should have felt the wrath of the superstitious Athenians. Biological Speculations Passing from the phenomena of the air to those of the earth itself, we learn that Anaxagoras explained an earthquake as being produced by the returning of air into the earth. We cannot be sure as to the exact meaning here, though the idea that gases are imprisoned in the substance of the earth seems not far afield. But a far more remarkable insight than this would imply was shown by Anaxagoras when he asserted that a certain amount of air is contained in water, and that fishes breathe this air. The passage of Aristotle in which this opinion is ascribed to Anaxagoras is of sufficient interest to be quoted at length: