A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



strange, nothing anomalous, in this view; it merely 

 reflects the current notions of Oriental peoples in an- 

 tiquity. What is strange and anomalous is the fact 

 that the Oriental dreamings thus expressed could have 

 been supposed to represent the acme of scientific 

 knowledge. Yet such a hold had these writings taken 

 upon the Western world that not even a Galileo dared 

 contradict tnem openly; and when the church fathers 

 gravely declared the heliocentric theory necessarily 

 false, because contradictory to Scripture, there were 

 probably few people in Christendom whose mental at- 

 titude would permit them justly to appreciate the 

 humor of such a pronouncement. And, indeed, if 

 here and there a man might have risen to such an 

 appreciation, there were abundant reasons for the 

 repression of the impulse, for there was nothing 

 humorous about the response with which the authori- 

 ties of the time were wont to meet the expression of 

 iconoclastic opinions. The burning at the stake of 

 Giordano Bruno, in the year 1600, was, for example, 

 an object-lesson well calculated to restrain the en- 

 thusiasm of other similarly minded teachers. 



Doubtless it was such considerations that explained 

 the relative silence of the champions of the Copernican 

 theory, accounting for the otherwise inexplicable fact 

 that about eighty years elapsed after the death of 

 Copernicus himself before a single text-book expounded 

 his theory. The text-book which then appeared, under 

 date of 1622, was written by the famous Kepler, who 

 perhaps was shielded in a measure from the papal 

 consequences of such hardihood by the fact of resi- 

 dence in a Protestant country. Not that the Prot- 



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