94,95] The Reception of the Coppernican Ideas 127 



tables naturally had great weight in inducing the astro- 

 nomical world gradually to recognise the merits of the 

 Coppernican system, at any rate as a basis for calculating 

 the places of the celestial bodies. 



Reinhold was unfortunately cut off by the plague in 

 1553, and with him disappeared a commentary on the De 

 Revolutionibus which he had prepared but not published. 



95. Very soon afterwards we find the first signs that the 

 Coppernican system had spread into England. In 1556 

 John Field published an almanack for the following year 

 avowedly based on Coppernicus and Reinhold, and a 

 passage in the Whetstone of Witte (1557) by Robert Recorde 

 (1510-1558), our first writer on algebra, shews that the 

 author regarded the doctrines of Coppernicus with favour, 

 even if he did not believe in them entirely. A few years 

 later Thomas Digges (?-i595), in his Alae siveScalae Mathe- 

 maticae (1573), an astronomical treatise of no great import- 

 ance, gave warm praise to Coppernicus and his ideas. 



96. For nearly half a century after the death of Reinhold 

 no important contributions were made to the Coppernican 

 controversy. Reinhold's tables were doubtless slowly 

 doing their work in familiarising men's minds with the 

 new ideas, but certain definite additions to knowledge had 

 to be made before the evidence for them could be regarded 

 as really conclusive. 



The serious mechanical difficulties connected with the 

 assumption of a rapid motion of the earth which is quite 

 imperceptible to its inhabitants could only be met by 

 further progress in mechanics, and specially in knowledge 

 of the laws according to which the motion of bodies is 

 produced, kept up, changed, or destroyed ; in this direction 

 no considerable progress was made before the time of 

 Galilei, whose work falls chiefly into the early i7th century 

 (cf. chapter vi., 116, 130, 133). 



The objection to the Coppernican scheme that the stars 

 shewed no such apparent annual motions as the motion 

 of the earth should produce (chapter iv., 92) would also 

 be either answered or strengthened according as improved 

 methods of observation did or did not reveal the required 

 motion. 



Moreover the Prussian Tables, although more accurate 



