[Sidenote: p. 29.] But he says that nothing is generated, or perishes or is moved, and that the universe which is one is beyond change. But he says that God is eternal, and one and alike on every side, and finite and spherical in form, and conscious[93] in all His parts. And that the sun is born every day from the gathering together of small particles of fire and that the earth is boundless and surrounded neither by air nor by heaven. And that there are boundless (innumerable) suns and moons and that all things are from the earth. He said that the sea is salt because of the many compounds which together flow into it. But Metrodorus said it was thanks to its trickling through the earth that the sea becomes salt. And Xenophanes opines that there was once a mixture of earth with the sea, and that in time it was freed from moisture, asserting in proof of this that shells are found in the centre of the land and on mountains, and that in the stone-quarries of Syracuse were found the impress of a fish and of seals, and in Paros the cast of an anchor below the surface of the rock[94] and in Malta layers of all sea-things. And he says that these came when all things were of old time buried in mud, and that the impress of them dried in the mud; but [Sidenote: p. 30.] that all men were destroyed when the earth being cast into the sea became mud, and that it again began to bring forth and that this catastrophe happened to all the ordered worlds.[95] 13. _About Ecphantus._ A certain Ecphantus, a Syracusan, said that a true knowledge of the things that are could not be got. But he defines, as he thinks, that the first bodies are indivisible and that there are three differences[96] between them, to wit, size, shape and power. And the number of them is limited and not boundless; but that these bodies are moved neither by weight nor by impact, but by a divine power which he calls [Sidenote: p. 31.] Nous and Psyche. Now the pattern of this is the cosmos, wherefore it has become spherical in form by Divine power. And that the earth in the midst of the cosmos is moved round its own centre from west to east.[97] 14. _About Hippo._ But Hippo of Rhegium[98] said that the principles were cold, like water, and heat, like fire. And that the fire came from the water, and, overcoming the power of its parent, constructed the cosmos. But he said that the soul was sometimes brain and sometimes water; for the seed also seems to us to be from moisture and from it he says the soul is born. These things, then, we seem to have sufficiently set forth. Wherefore, as we have now separately run through the opinions of the physicists, it seems fitting that we return to Socrates and Plato, who most especially preferred (the study of) ethics. 15. _About Socrates._