Page:Edward Thorpe — History of Chemistry, Volume I (1909).pdf/42

26 through the Moslems Geber and Avicenna that they gained acquaintance with the science of the East.

The conception that matter is made up of particles or atoms, and that these particles are in a state of ceaseless motion, is to be met with in Hindu and Phœnician philosophy. It was taught by Anaxagoras, Leukippos, and Demokritos to the Greeks, and by Lucretius to the Romans. Leukippos and Demokritos explained the creation of the world as due solely to physical agencies without the intervention of a creative intelligence. According to their theories, the atoms are variable, not only in size, but in weight. The smallest atoms are also the lightest. Atoms are impenetrable; no two atoms can simultaneously occupy the same place. The collision of the atoms gives them an oscillatory movement, which is communicated to adjacent atoms, and these, in their turn, transmit it to the most distant ones. Anaxagoras taught that every atom is a world in miniature, and that the living body is a congeries of atoms derived from the aliments which sustain it. Plants are living things, endowed like animals with respiratory functions, and, like them, atomically constituted. This philosopher was so far in advance of his age that his countrymen accused him of sacrilege, and he only escaped death by flight. Further, the assumption that these atoms