THE NEW COSMOLOGY 



our earth would, obviously, never again be called in 

 question. But demonstration of the sphericity of the 

 earth had, of course, no direct bearing upon the ques- 

 tion of the earth's position in the universe. There- 

 fore the voyage of Magellan served to fortify, rather 

 than to dispute, the Ptolemaic theory. According 

 to that theory, as we have seen, the earth was sup- 

 posed to lie immovable at the centre of the universe; 

 the various heavenly bodies, including the sun, re- 

 volving about it in eccentric circles. We have seen 

 that several of the ancient Greeks,_ notably^ Aris- 

 tarchusy disputed, thjs__Qneption. decjaring^for~the 

 Central posiiiorj^jof-JLe_^^ and the 



motion of the earth^and jobber plpmets about that 

 bodyHj3ut Ibhis. revoJutionar}M,heory seemed so op- 

 posed to the ordinary observft^ioft-that fc> ttaving been 

 discountenanced by Hipparchus and Ptolemy, it did 

 not find a single important champion for more than a 

 thousand years after the time of the last great Alex- 



The first man, seemingly, to hark back to the 

 Aristarchian conception in the new scientific era that 

 was now dawning was the noted cardinal, Nikolaus 

 of Cusa, who lived in the first half of the fifteenth 

 century, and was distinguished as a philosophical 

 writer and mathematician. His De Docta Ignorantia 

 expressly propounds the doctrine of the earth's motion. 

 No one, however, paid the slightest attention to his 

 suggestion, w r hich, therefore, merely serves to furnish 

 us with another interesting illustration of the futility 

 of propounding even a correct hypothesis before the 

 time is ripe to receive it particularly if the hypoth- 



VOL. II. 5 ? 



