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JULY, 1968
effect that the motion of heavenly bodies was to be explained in terms of uniform motion in circles. This indeed would lead to complications, for, in the case of the stars this could perhaps readily be done by assuming that these were attached to a great sphere which rotated daily about the earth; but the same explanation would not hold about the more irregular motions of the planets around the sun. Such complications were, however, neglected by the Greek philosophers. Eudoxus and Aristotle had sought to explain the complication in terms of motion of homocentric sphere; but this again could not account for the apparent changes in the distance of some of the bodies from the earth. The cosmological model of the ancient Greeks reached its perfection in Alexandria in the hands of Ptolemy from whom it was received by the Arabs. The Arabs could make only very minor modifications on the Greek model and handed it down later to the reawakening West.
To be continued
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