These ideas were vague, they were mixed with absurdities, but they were germ ideas, and even amid the luxuriant growth of theology in the early Christian Church these germs began struggling into life in the minds of a few thinking men, and these men renewed the suggestion that the earth is a globe.( 26) (26) The agency of the Pythagoreans in first spreading the doctrine of the earth's sphericity is generally acknowledged, but the first full and clear utterance of it to the world was by Aristotle.

Very fruitful, too, was the statement of the new theory given by Plato in the Timaeus; see Jowett's translation, 62, c.

Also the Phaedo, pp.449 et seq.

See also Grote on Plato's doctrine on the sphericity of the earth; also Sir G.C.
Lewis's Astronomy of the Ancients, London, 1862, chap.

iii, section i, and note.