With such an enormous geographical range the species must of necessity present itself under a considerable number of local phases, differing from one another to a greater or less degree in the matters of size and colouring.
The art has merely Ancient developed new phases in modern times.
Various as were the phases through which sophistry passed between the middle of the 5th century and the middle of the 4th, the sophists - Socrates himself being no exception - had in their declared antagonism to philosophy a common characteristic; and, if in the interval, philosophical speculation being temporarily suspended, scepticism ceased for the time to be peculiar, at the outset, when Protagoras and Gorgias broke with the physicists, and in the sequel, when Plato raised the cry of " back to Parmenides," this common characteristic was distinctive.
With this last instrument he discovered in 1610 the satellites of Jupiter, and soon afterwards the spots on the sun, the phases of Venus, and the hills and valleys on the moon.
Leaving aside the primitive phases of the religion as lying beyond the ken of historical investigation, we may note the sharp distinction to be made between the pre-Khammurabic age and the post-Khammurabic age.
