COPERNICUS IN ITALY. 



403 



at the same time with another scheme for re- 

 forming the constitution of the universe. A Mi- 

 lanese physician named Girolamo Fracastoro, 

 ignorant of the work being done at Frauenburg, 

 devoted his extraordinary abilities to the ungrate- 

 ful task of repairing and setting on its legs again 

 the discarded system of homocentric spheres, 

 which had always been a favorite with the Peri- 

 patetics, and which Dante had chosen as the 

 framework of his wonderful Cosmos. It is evi- 

 dent that the time was ripe for change. 



The interval between the first coming of Co- 

 pernicus to Italy and his final departure from it 

 was eight years — from the end of 1496 to that 

 of 1504. But his sojourn was interrupted by 

 two homeward journeys for the purpose mainly of 

 obtaining renewed leave of absence from the 

 Chapter of Frauenburg. The first was in 1499, 

 after the University of Bologna had conferred 

 upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws — Decre- 

 torum Doctor. Later in the same year, he re- 

 turned to Bologna, accompanied by his brother 

 Andrew ; but, finding themselves in extremely 

 necessitous circumstances — probably because the 

 pittance which had been bread for one was star- 

 vation for two — the brothers repaired to Rome in 

 the Jubilee year, 1500. There, for about ten 

 months, Nicholas taught mathematics amid the 

 plaudits of thronging audiences, and, abstracted 

 from the calamities and crimes of the nether 

 world, he lost himself in the contemplation of that 

 . " Paradise of golden lights,'' 



which Night opens, 



" Deep, immeasurable, vast! " 



above the Capitoline ruins and palaces. One 

 perceives that he had made good use of his time 

 in Bologna, and had profited abundantly by the 

 teachings of Scipione del Ferro, Professor of 

 Mathematics in that school. There is little or 

 no doubt that to Del Ferro rightly belongs the 

 discovery of the formula for solving cubic equa- 

 tions which goes by the name of Girolamo Car- 

 dano — a discovery, by which modern Europe 

 made its first great scientific stride, leaving, all 

 at once, both Greeks and Arabs at an immeasu- 

 rable and increasing distance. 



Again, in 1501, both Nicholas and Andrew 

 Copernicus were in Poland, and this time the 

 Chapter of Frauenburg granted them a more pro- 

 longed leave for the purpose of studying at Pa- 

 dua. The permission, we are told, was granted 

 the more willingly, because Nicholas promised to 

 devote himself to medicine ! Thus, when, after 

 three years' further study, he finally returned to 



his native land, he was a doctor in two faculties, 

 as well as a competent classical scholar, a rare 

 mathematician, and the astronomer all the world 

 knows of. The remainder of his life, which 

 reached out to seventy years, was spent in labo- 

 rious and unbroken solitude. Like Dante, he 

 lived in his book, and, like Dante, he died in giv- 

 ing birth to an immortal offspring. We learn 

 from his prefatory letter to Pope Paul III. that 

 he began the great work in which he gave per- 

 manent form to the patient convictions of his 

 genius — " De Revolutionibus Orbium coelestium " 

 — in 1507, and worked at it without intermission 

 up to the year of its publication, 1543, which 

 was also that of the death of its author. 



The evolution of ideas in the minds of men 

 of genius is always a more or less obscure pro- 

 cess, difficult to be traced even by the thinkers 

 themselves, who are usually but imperfectly con- 

 scious of the successive steps by which they ad- 

 vance from intuition to intuition. Thought is a 

 winged courser, whose race has neither starting- 

 point nor goal — an apparition out of the mists of 

 Time. The account given by Copernicus himself 

 (in the above-mentioned letter to Paul III.) of 

 the incubation of his new ideas is therefore not 

 to be taken as exhaustive. The letter in ques- 

 tion, moreover, was evidently written with a pur- 

 pose. He desired to prove that the system which 

 he advocated was, not an innovation, but a re- 

 vival of opinions already sanctioned by antiqui- 

 ty — the sacro-sancta anliquitas of the Renais- 

 sance. 



" He began to be weary," he says, " of the 

 unstable theories taught in the schools as to the 

 constitution of a machine built by the most per- 

 fect and most systematic of Artificers, and he 

 therefore undertook the task of reperusing all 

 that philosophers had written on the subject." 



This project, the very conception of which 

 implies a considerable acquaintance with classical 

 literature, must have been undertaken and car- 

 ried out in Italy. First, because Copernicus, un- 

 til he came thither, knew little Latin and no 

 Greek ; next, because in Italy only could he have 

 access to a sufficiently extensive collection of an- 

 cient authors to make the scheme useful or feasi- 

 ble. In all probability, his thoughts were first 

 directed to the subject by the conversations which 

 he heard carried on around him at Bologna, where 

 the question, An terra moveatur ? was a moot- 

 point for discussion. Two things forcibly strike 

 us in the apology of Copernicus for his doctrine. 

 This contained a double innovation ; it made the 

 earth rotate on its own axis, and it made the 



