COPERNICUS. 109 



COPERNICUS. 



By EDWARD S. HOLDEN, Sc.D., LL.D., 



LIBRARIAN OF THE U. S. MILITARY ACADEMY. 



"XTICOLAUS COPERNICUS was born in Thorn, a town of Prus- 

 -*-^ sian Poland, on February 19, 1473. His father, Niklas Kop- 

 pernigk, was a merchant of Krakau who established himself in Thorn 

 about 1450, and there married Barbara, the daughter of Lucas Watzel- 

 rode, a descendant of an old patrician family. The father was chosen 

 alderman in 1465 — a testimony of his worth. He had four children: 

 Barbara, who died abbess of the Cistercians at Culm; Katherina, who 

 married a merchant of Krakau; and two sons, Andreas and Nicolaus. 



We know little of the childhood of Nicolaus. In 1483 his father 

 died and he was placed in the care of his uncle, another Lucas Watzel- 

 rode, who was called to be bishop of Ermeland in 1489, and with whose 

 career that of Copernicus is closely bound up. The boy was educated 

 in Thorn till his nineteenth year, when he was placed in the University 

 of Krakau. The greatest illustration of its faculty was Albertus Blar 

 de Brudzewo (usually written Brudzewski), professor of astronomy 

 and mathematics. The works of Purbach and of Regiomontanus were 

 expounded in his lectures. In the winter semester of 1491-92 Coper- 

 nicus was matriculated in the faculty of arts, and devoted himself, so 

 it is recorded, with the greatest diligence and success to mathematical 

 and astronomical studies, becoming, at the same time, familiar with 

 the use of astronomical instruments. In the autumn of 1494 Brud- 

 zewski left the university, and it is probable that Copernicus did the 

 same. The humanists of the faculty had suffered a defeat at the 

 hands of the scholastics, and the latter now ruled supreme. At Krakau 

 Copernicus studied the theory of perspective, and applied it in paint- 

 ing. Portraits from his hand are praised by his contemporaries. 



In the summer of 1496 the youth went to Italy, and in January, 

 1497, he was inscribed at the University of Bologna, in the 'Album 

 of the German Nation,' as a student of jurisprudence. From 1484 to 

 1514 the professor of astronomy at Bologna was Dominicus Maria da 

 Novara. He was an observer, a theorist, as well as a free critic of the 

 received doctrines of Ptolemy, although such of his criticisms as we 

 know are not especially happy, it must be confessed. He determined 

 the obliquity of the ecliptic to be 23° 29' by his own observations, 

 which is in error by V 20" only, a small quantity for his time. Coper- 



