1 8 COSMOS. 



an^ X.ej>!er. ITe was contemporary with Galileo, but did 

 not live to see the invention of the telescope by Hans Lipper- 

 sbey and Zacharias Jansen, and did not therefore witness 

 the discovery of the " lesser Jupiter world," the phases of 

 Venus, and the nebula. With bold confidence in what he 

 terms the lume interno, ragione naturale, altezza dell' intelletto 

 (force of intellect), he indulged in happy conjectures re- 

 garding the movement of the fixed stars, the planetary 

 nature of comets, and the deviation from the spherical form 

 observed in the figure of the earth. * Greek antiquity is 

 also replete with uranological presentiments of this nature, 

 which were realised in later times. 



In the development of thought on cosmical relations, of which 

 the main forms and epochs have been already enumerated, Kep- 

 ler approached the nearest to a mathematical application of the 

 theory of gravitation, more than seventy-eight years before the 

 appearance of Newton's immortal work, Principia Philosophic 

 Naturalis. For while the eclectic Simplicius only expressed in 

 general terms ' ' that the heavenly bodies were sustained from fall- 

 ing in consequence of the centrifugal force being superior to the 

 inherent falling force of bodies and to the downward traction ;" 

 while Joannes Philoponus, a disciple of Ammonius Hermeas, 



Paris, Oxford, Marburg, Wittenberg (which he calls the 

 Athens of Germany), Prague, and Helmstedt, where, in 1589, 

 he completed the scientific instruction of Duke Henry Julius 

 of Brims wick- Wolf enbuttel. Bartholme'ss, torn. i. pp. 167 

 -178. He also taught at Padua subsequently to 1592. 



Bartholmess, torn. ii. pp. 219, 232, 370. Bruno carefully 

 collected all the separate observations made on the celestial 

 phenomenon of the sudden appearance, in 1572, of a new star 

 in Cassiopeia. Much discussion has been directed in modern 

 times to the relation existing between Bruno, his two 

 Calabrian fellow-countryman, Bernardino Telesio and Thomas 

 Campanella, and the platonic cardinal, Nicolaus Krebs of 

 ; see Cosmos, p. 691, note. 



