Masterpieces of Science 



and must ever form, the base on which his suc- 

 cessors shall build. The astronomer of to-day 

 may look back upon Hipparchus and Ptolemy 

 as the earliest ancestors of whom he has positive 

 knowledge. He can trace his scientific descent 

 from generation to generation, through the 

 periods of Arabian and mediaeval science, through 

 Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, La Place and 

 Herschel, down to the present time. The evolu- 

 tion of astronomical knowledge, generally slow 

 and gradual, offering little to excite the attention 

 of the public, has yet been marked by two cata- 

 clysms. One of these is seen in the grand con- 

 ception of Copernicus that this earth on which 

 we dwell is not a globe fixed in the centre of the 

 universe, but simply one of a number of bodies, 

 turning on their own axes and at the same time 

 moving around the sun as a centre. It has 

 always seemed to me that the real significance of 

 the heliocentric system lies in the greatness of 

 this conception rather than in the fact of the 

 discovery itself. There is no figure in astronom- 

 ical history which may more appropriately claim 

 the admiration of mankind through all time than 

 that of Copernicus. Scarcely any great work 

 was ever so exclusively the work of one man as 

 was the heliocentric system the work of the retir- 

 ing sage of Frauenberg. No more striking con- 

 trast between the views of scientific research 

 entertained in his time than in ours can be seen 

 than that seen in the fact that, instead of claiming 

 credit for his great work, he deemed it rather 

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