ning,
manufacturing, ship-building, corn-raising, owned Miletus for their
mother-city. Its {2} marts must therefore have been crowded with
merchants of every country from India to Spain, from Arabia to Russia;
the riches and the wonders of every clime must have become familiar to
its inhabitants. And fitly enough, therefore, in this city was born
the first notable Greek geographer, the first constructor of a map, the
first observer of natural and other curiosities, the first recorder of
varieties of custom among various communities, the first speculator on
the causes of strange phenomena,--Hecataeus. His work is in great part
lost, but we know a good deal about it from the frequent references to
him and it in the work of his rival and follower, Herodotus.

The city naturally held a leading place politically as well as
commercially. Empire in our sense was alien to the instincts of the
Greek race; but Miletus was for centuries recognised as the foremost
member of a great commercial and political league, the political
character of the league becoming more defined, as first the Lydian and
then the Persian monarchy became an aggressive neighbour on its borders.

[8]

It was in this active, prosperous, enterprising state, and at the
period of its highest activity, that Thales, statesman, practical
engineer, mathematician, philosopher, flourished. Without attempting
to fix his date too closely, we may take it that he was a leading man
in Miletus for the greater part of the {3} first half of the sixth
century before Christ. We hear of an eclipse predicted by him, of the
course of a river usefully changed, of shrewd and profitable handling
of the market, of wise advice in the general councils of the league.
He seems to have been at once a student of mathematics and an observer
of nature, and withal something having analogy with both, an inquirer
or speculator into the _origin_ of things. To us nowadays this
suggests a student of geology, or physiography, or some such branch of
physical science; to Thales it probably rather suggested a theoretical
inquiry into the simplest _thinkable_ aspect of things as existing.
"Under what form known to us," he would seem to have asked, "may we
assume an identity in all known things, so as best to cover or render
explicable the things as we know them?" The 'beginning' of things (for
it was thus he described this assumed identity) was not conceived by
him as something which was long