ABSTRACT
The first rational explanation of the water cycle coincided with the “Greek Miracle” (Lord, 1974) in the 6th Century B.C., when Greek philosophy broke from its ancient myth-based explanations for natural phenomena. Before this golden period of philosophical and scientific achievements, there was certainly a degree of highly evolved technical knowledge, but it was not until the Greek philosopher Thales of Milet1 that anyone attempted a theory of causal explanations, and more importantly, understood the need to seek such explanations. Thales was also the first to speculate that all things derived from a single element. For Thales, this original element was water. As Aristotle later suggested in his Metaphysics, Thales had perhaps noticed that water is present everywhere and in everything; it is a necessity for life.
