Parmenides, the Eleatic philosopher, who was at the height of his fame about 475 B. C., declared that both motion and change of substance were illusory--that no substances ever transform from one to another. The Pythagoreans and the School of Leucippus admitted that there was, indeed, an element of elements that knew no change, no transformations; and they declared that this primal element was the stuff that _all_ atoms are made of. Today we believe his primal element (atom) to be hydrogen--as was suggested by the English physician, William Prout, in 1815. In other words, we are being forced by the mathematical and experimental data to conclude that all of the 87 known species of atoms (or elements) are but compounds of the original (simplest) hydrogen atom, consisting of one positively charged nuclear electron and one outlying negative electron. However, there is ground for difference of opinion on this question, as shown by Sir Oliver Lodge in his recent article, “Within the Atom,” _Scientific American_, November, 1923. “Thought,” comments Professor Alfred Weber (“History of Philosophy,” Pages 43-44), “discovers in the atomistic hypothesis the middle term that unites Parmenides, who denies the great empirical fact of generation and change, and Heraclitus, who sacrifices being and its permanence to becoming,--thereby combining the two rival systems into a higher synthesis,--and lays the foundation for every rational explanation of the process of becoming. Henceforth philosophy no longer regards matter as a continuous mass, the essential properties of which are incessantly transformed. It breaks them up into parts that are in themselves immutable, but which continually change their relative positions. As a consequence, there can be both perpetual change in the aspects of matter (bodies) and permanence in the essence and properties of matter. All change is reduced to change of place: _mechanism_.” THE FIERY “MONADS” (ATOMS) “Fire,” with the Pythagoreans, as with the followers of Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 B. C.), is _the_ element _par excellence_; and, as previously stated, was regarded by them as made up of excessively minute particles of tetrahedral (pyramidal) form (Philolaus). This “subtile element” was looked upon as the symbol of the divine principle in nature. They taught that this “fire” is concentrated in a central sun, “the hearth of the universe,” “mother of the gods,” “citadel of Zeus,” etc., around which revolve the earth and the other heavenly bodies.[4] The soul of man is a portion of the world-soul, a spark of the celestial fire, and in this sense material. Aristotle states (_De Anima_, i, 2) that some of the Pythagoreans held the solar corpuscles (atoms) to be souls, while others referred to that which set them in motion as the soul. Schlottman’s reading of this passage is: “The solar corpuscles are moved by a soul, and the soul is, generally speaking, the moving principle.”