"In the Phaedo we read that the "true earth,"... looked at from above, is "many-coloured like the balls that are made of twelve pieces of leather." In the Timaeus... "Further, as there is still one construction left, the fifth, God made use of it for the universe when he painted it." ...[T]he approaches more nearly to the than any other of the regular solids. The twelve pieces of leather used to make a ball would... be s; and, if the material were not flexible like leather, we should have a dodecahedron instead of a sphere. This points to the Pythagoreans having had at least the rudiments of the "" formulated later by Eudoxos."