ANAXIMAWDER, a Greek mathematician and philosopher, the son of Praxiades, and the disciple and friend of Males, was b. at Miletus 610 B. C. , and d. in 546. His prin cipal study was mathematics. He is said to have discovered the obliquity of the ecliptic, and certainly taught it. He appears to have applied the gnomon, or style set on a horizontal plane, to determine the solstices and equinoxes. The invention of geo graphical maps is also ascribed to him. As a philosopher, he speculated on the origin (arctic) of the phenomenal world, and this principle he held to be the infinite or indeter minate (to apeiron). This indeterminate principle of-A, is generally supposed to have been much the same with the chaos of other philosophers. From it he conceived all opposites, such as hot and cold, dry and moist, to proceed through a perpetual motion, and to return to it again. Of the manner in which lie imagined these opposites to be formed, and of his hypothesis concerning the formation of the heavenly bodies from them, we have no accurate information. It would seem, however, that he did not believe
in the generation of anything in the proper sense of the word, but supposed that the infinite atoms or units of which the cache, or primary matter, is composed, merely change their relative positions in obedience to a moving power residing in it. Some of his particular opinions were that the sun is in the highest region of the heavens, is in circumference 28 times greater than the earth, and resembles a cylinder from which flow continual streams of fire; that eclipses are caused by the stopping of the openings from which the fire flows; that the moon is also a cylinder, 19 times greater than the earth; and that the moon's phases are caused by obliquity of position, and eclipses by complete turning round. Ile taught that the earth is of the form of a cylinder, and that it floats in the midst of the universe, that it was formed by the drying up of moisture by the sun, and that animals are produced from moisture.