Anaxagoras as Meteorologist
The man who had studied the meteorite of Ægospotami,
and been put by it on the track of such remarkable
inductions, was, naturally, not oblivious to
the other phenomena of the atmosphere. Indeed, such
a mind as that of Anaxagoras was sure to investigate
all manner of natural phenomena, and almost
equally sure to throw new light on any subject that it
investigated. Hence it is not surprising to find Anaxagoras
credited with explaining the winds as due to the
rarefactions of the atmosphere produced by the sun.
This explanation gives Anaxagoras full right to be
called "the father of meteorology,'' a title which, it
may be, no one has thought of applying to him, chiefly
because the science of meteorology did not make its
real beginnings until some twenty-four hundred years
after the death of its first great votary. Not content
with explaining the winds, this prototype of Franklin
turned his attention even to the tipper atmosphere.
"Thunder,'' he is reputed to have said, "was produced
by the collision of the clouds, and lightning by the rubbing
together of the clouds.'' We dare not go so far
as to suggest that this implies an association in the
mind of Anaxagoras between the friction of the clouds
and the observed electrical effects generated by the
friction of such a substance as amber. To make such
a suggestion doubtless would be to fall victim to the
old familiar propensity to read into Homer things that
Homer never knew. Yet the significant fact remains
that Anaxagoras ascribed to thunder and to lightning
their true position as strictly natural phenomena.
For him it was no god that menaced humanity with
thundering voice and the flash of his divine fires from
the clouds. Little wonder that the thinker whose
science carried him to such scepticism as this should
have felt the wrath of the superstitious Athenians.
