the home of Pythagoras and
Xenophanes in their later years, and of Parmenides and Empedocles, Zeno,
and Archimedes. Northern Africa can claim, by birth or by adoption,
such names as Euclid, Apollonius of Perga, Herophilus, Erasistratus,
Aristippus, Eratosthenes, Ctesibius, Hero, Strabo, and Ptolemy. This is
but running over the list of great men whose discoveries have claimed
our attention. Were we to extend the list to include a host of workers
of the second rank, we should but emphasize the same fact.

All along we are speaking of Greeks, or, as they call themselves,
Hellenes, and we mean by these words the people whose home was a small
jagged peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean at the southeastern
extremity of Europe. We think of this peninsula as the home of Greek
culture, yet of all the great thinkers we have just named, not one was
born on this peninsula, and perhaps not one in five ever set foot upon
it. In point of fact, one Greek thinker of the very first rank, and one
only, was born in Greece proper; that one, however, was Plato, perhaps
the greatest of them all. With this one brilliant exception (and even he
was born of parents who came from the provinces), all the great thinkers
of Greece had their origin at the circumference rather than the centre
of the empire. And if we reflect that this circumference of the Greek
world was in the nature of the case the widely circling region in which
the Greek came in contact with other nations, we shall see at once that
there could be no more striking illustration in all history than that
furnished us here of the value of racial mingling as a stimulus to
intellectual progress.

But there is one other feature of the matter that must not be
overlooked. Racial mingling gives vitality, but to produce the best
effect the mingling must be that of races all of which are at a
relatively high plane of civilization. In Asia Minor the Greek mingled
with the Semite, who had the heritage of centuries of culture; and in
Italy with the Umbrians, Oscans, and Etruscans, who, little as we know
of their antecedents, have left us monuments to testify to their high
development. The chief reason why the racial mingling of a later day did
not avail at once to give new life to Roman thought was that the races
which swept down from the north were barbarians. It was no more possible
that they should spring to the heights of classical culture than it
would, for example, be possible in two o