One morning he was thinking of this question while he was getting ready for a bath. The great bowl or tub was full to the very edge, and as he stepped into it a quantity of water flowed out upon the stone floor. A similar thing had happened a hundred times before, but this was the first time that Archimedes had thought about it.
“How much water did I displace by getting into the tub?” he asked himself. “Anybody can see that I displaced a bulk of water equal to the bulk of my body. A man half my size would displace half as much.
“Now suppose, instead of putting myself into the tub, I had put Hiero’s crown into it, it would have displaced a bulk of water equal to its own bulk. All, let me see! Gold is much heavier than silver. Ten pounds of pure gold will not make so great a bulk as say seven pounds of gold mixed with three pounds