 How are we, then, to understand Eurytus’ procedure? It does not seem plausible to suppose that he simply drew a picture or an outline drawing of a man or a horse and then counted the number of pebbles required to make the outline (Riedweg 2005, 86) or fill in the picture, since the number would vary with the size of the drawing and the size of the pebbles. A large picture of a man would require many more pebbles than a small one, so that it would seem arbitrary which number to associate with man. This interpretation treats Eurytus as a mosaicist and is largely derived from Alexander’s testimony. Aristotle’s presentation supports another interpretation. He draws a parallel with those who arrange numbers of pebbles into shapes, such as a triangle or a square. This suggests that Eurytus had observed that, e.g., any three points in a plane determine a triangle and any four a quadrilateral. He may then have drawn the general conclusion that any shape or structure was determined by a unique number of points and tried to represent these by setting out the necessary number of pebbles. Thus, the complex structure of a three-dimensional object such as the human body would require a large number of points, but the number of points required to determine a human being could be expected to be unique and to differ from the number that determined any other object in the natural world, such as a horse (Kirk and Raven 1957, 313 ff.; Guthrie 1962, 273 ff.; Barnes 1982, 390–391; Cambiano 1998). It is important to note that nothing in these reports suggests that Eurytus thought that things were composed of numbers or that he regarded the points that defined a given thing as atoms of which things were made, as has sometimes been supposed (Cornford 1922–1923, 10–11). Instead, he is best understood as making a bold attempt to show that the structure of all things is determined by number and thus to provide specifics for Philolaus’ general thesis that all things are known through number. Another approach is to argue that no reference is being made to creating a picture out of pebbles. The pebbles refer instead to counters on an abacus, which the Greeks used for calculations. In this case Eurytus can be supposed to have started by identifying certain basic numerical properties with features of the world and then deriving the number of man or horse through calculations using the abacus (Netz 2014, 173–178).