sculptures once adorned was a petrified memorial of antiquity, and, by the mere form of its architecture, must have carried back men’s thoughts to the earliest Hellenic habitation, the simple structure in which a gabled roof was supported by cross-beams on a row of upright wooden posts. Turning back once more from art and literature to philosophy, is it not abundantly clear that if the Greeks speculated at all, they must at first have speculated according to some such method as that which history proves them to have actually followed? They must have begun by fixing their thoughts, as Thales and his successors did, on the world’s remotest past; they must have sought for a first cause of things, and conceived it, not as any spiritual power, but as a kind of natural ancestor homogeneous with the forms which issued from it, although greater and more comprehensive than they were; in short, as an elemental body—water, air, fire, or, more vaguely, as an infinite substance. Did not the steady concatenation of cause and effect resemble the unrolling of a heroic genealogy? And did not the reabsorption of every individual existence in a larger whole translate into more general terms that subordination of personal to family and civic glory which is the diapason of Pindar’s music? Nor was this all. Before philosophising, the Greeks did not think only in the order of time; they learned at a very early period to think also in the order of space, their favourite idea of a limit being made especially prominent here. Homer’s geographical notions, however erroneous, are, for his age, singularly well defined. Aeschylus has a wide knowledge of the earth’s surface, and exhibits it with perhaps unnecessary readiness. Pindar delights to follow his mythological heroes about on their travels. The same tendency found still freer scope when prose literature began. Hecataeus, one of the earliest prose-writers, was great both as a genealogist and as a geographer; and in this respect also Herodotus carried out on a great scale the enquiries most habitually pursued by his countrymen. Now, it will be remembered that we have had occasion to characterise early Ionian speculation as being, to a great extent, cosmography. The element from which it deduced all things was, in fact, that which was supposed to lie outside and embrace the rest. The geographical limit was conceived as a genealogical ancestor. Thus, the studies which men like Hecataeus carried on separately, were combined, or rather confused, in a single bold generalisation by Anaximenes and Heracleitus.