If I do not mention the climate, the reason is this; that in countries devoted exclusively to commerce, the climate does not matter much. Ships can be built and goods can be unloaded, rain or shine. Provided it does not get so cold that the harbors freeze or so wet that the towns are flooded, the inhabitants will take very little interest in the daily weather reports. But aside from this, the weather of Ionia was distinctly favorable to the development of an intellectual class. Before the existence of books and libraries, learning was handed down from man to man by word of mouth and the town-pump was the earliest of all social centers and the oldest of universities. In Miletus it was possible to sit around the town-pump for 350 out of every 365 days. And the early Ionian professors made such excellent use of their climatic advantages that they became the pioneers of all future scientific development. The first of whom we have any report, the real founder of modern science, was a person of doubtful origin. Not in the sense that he had robbed a bank or murdered his family and had fled to Miletus from parts unknown. But no one knew much about his antecedents. Was he a Boeotian or a Phoenician, a Nordic (to speak in the jargon of our learned racial experts) or a Semite? It shows what an international center this little old city at the mouth of the Meander was in those days. Its population (like that of New York today) consisted of so many different elements that people accepted their neighbors at their face value and did not look too closely into the family antecedents. Since this is not a history of mathematics or a handbook of philosophy, the speculations of Thales do not properly belong in these pages, except in so far as they tend to show the tolerance towards new ideas which prevailed among the Ionians at a time when Rome was a small market-town on a muddy river somewhere in a distant and unknown region, when the Jews were still captives in the land of Assyria and when northern and western Europe were naught but a howling wilderness. In order that we may understand how such a development was possible, we must know something about the changes which had taken place since the days when Greek chieftains sailed across the Aegean Sea, intent upon the plunder of the rich fortress of Troy. Those far-famed heroes were still the product of an exceedingly primitive form of civilization. They were over-grown children who regarded life as one long, glorified rough-house, full of excitement and wrestling matches and running races and all the many things which we ourselves would dearly love to do if we were not forced to stick to the routine jobs which provide us with bread and bananas.