In such an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual freedom, in a city filled with the pungent smell of ships from all the seven seas, rich with fabrics of the Orient, merry with the laughter of a well fed and contented populace, Thales was born. In such a city he worked and taught and in such a city he died. If the conclusions which he reached differed greatly from the opinions held by most of his neighbors, remember that his ideas never penetrated beyond a very limited circle. The average Miletian may have heard the name of Thales, just as the average New Yorker has probably heard the name of Einstein. Ask him who Einstein is, and he will answer that he is a fellow with long hair who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle and who wrote something about a man walking through a railroad train, about which there once was an article in a Sunday paper. That this strange person who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle has got hold of a little spark of truth which eventually may upset (or at least greatly modify) the scientific conclusions of the last sixty centuries, is a matter of profound indifference to the millions of easy-going citizens whose interest in mathematics does not reach beyond the conflict which arises when their favorite batsman tries to upset the law of gravity. The text-books of ancient history usually get rid of the difficulty by printing “Thales of Miletus (640-546 B.C.), the founder of modern science.” And we can almost see the headlines in the “Miletus Gazette” saying, “Local graduate discovers secret of true science.” But just how and where and when Thales left the beaten track and struck out for himself, I could not possibly tell you. This much is certain, that he did not live in an intellectual vacuum, nor did he develop his wisdom out of his inner consciousness. In the seventh century before Christ, a great deal of the pioneer work in the realm of science had already been done and there was quite a large body of mathematical and physical and astronomical information at the disposal of those intelligent enough to make use of it. Babylonian star-gazers had searched the heavens. Egyptian architects had done considerable figuring before they dared to dump a couple of million tons of granite on top of a little burial chamber in the heart of a pyramid. The mathematicians of the Nile Valley had seriously studied the behavior of the sun that they might predict the wet and dry seasons and give the peasants a calendar by which they could regulate their work on the farms. All these problems, however, had been solved by people who still regarded the forces of nature as the direct and personal expression of the will of certain invisible Gods who administered the seasons and the course of the planets and the tides of the ocean as the members of the President’s cabinet manage the department of agriculture or the post-office or the treasury.