to endless combinations of circular motions to preserve their ideal perfection. (98.) Undoubtedly among the Greek philosophers were many men of transcendent talents and virtues, the ornaments of their species, and justly entitled to the veneration of all posterity; but regarded as a body they can hardly be considered otherwise than as a knot of disputatious candidates for popular favour, too busy in maintaining their ascendency over their followers and admirers, by an ostentatious display of superior knowledge, to have the leisure (had they always the inclination) to base their pretensions on a deep and sure foundation, and yet too sensible of the disgrace and inconvenience of failure, not to defend their dogmas, however shallow, when once promulgated, against their keen and sagacious opponents, by every art of sophism or appeal to passion. Hence the crudities and chimerical views with which their systems of philosophy, both natural and moral, were overloaded; their endless disputes about verbal subtleties, and, last and worst, the proud assumption with which they sheltered ignorance and indolence under the screen of unintelligible jargon or dogmatical assertion. Perhaps, however, this character applies rather to the later than to the earlier of the Greek philosophers. The spirit of rational enquiry into nature seems, if we can judge from the uncertain and often contradictory notices handed down to us of their tenets, to have been far more alive, and less warped by this vain and arrogant turn, then than at a later period. We know not now what was the precise meaning attached by Thales to his opinion, that water was the origin of all things; but modern geologists will not be at a loss to conceive how an observant traveller might become impressed with this notion, without having recourse to the mystic records of Egypt or Chaldea. His ideas of eclipses and of the nature of the moon were sound; and his prediction of an eclipse of the sun, in particular, was attended with circumstances so remarkable as to have made it a matter of important investigation to modern astronomers. Anaxagoras, among a number of crude and imperfectly explained notions, speculated rationally enough on the cause of the winds and of the rainbow, and less absurdly on earthquakes than many modern geologists have done, and appears generally to have had his attention alive to nature, and his mind open to just reasoning on its phenomena; while Pythagoras, whether he reasoned it out for himself, or borrowed the notion from Egypt or India, had attained a just conception of the general disposition of the parts of the solar system, and the place held by the earth in it; nay, according to some accounts, had even raised his views so far as to speculate on the attraction of the sun as the bond of its union.