Scientific Lectures. 205 



The very name, Ptolemaic tlieory, cai-riecl weight. It had been 

 elaborated until it accounted well for the phenomena. Exact textual 

 interpreters of scripture cherished it, for it agreed with what they 

 supposed the reading of sacred text. Still, the germs of the Helio- 

 centric theory had been planted long before, and well planted ; it 

 had seemed ready even to bloom forth in the mind of Cardinal de 

 Cusa, but the chill of dogmatism was still over the earth, and up to 

 the beginning of the sixteenth century there had come to this great 

 truth neither bloom nor fruitage. Quietly, however, the soil was 

 receiving enrichment, and the air warmth. The processes of mathe- 

 matics were constantly improved, the heavenly bodies were steadily 

 though silently observ^ed, and at length appeared, afar off from the 

 centers of thought, on the borders of Poland, a plain, simple-minded 

 scholar, who first fairly uttered to the world the truth now so com- 

 monplace, then so astounding, that the sun and planets do not revolve 

 about the earth, but that the earth and planets revolve about the sun, 

 and that man was Nicolas Kopernik. Kopernik had been a professor 

 at Rome, but as this truth grew within him, he seemed to feel that at 

 Rome he was no longer safe. Returning to his own country, he found 

 it wretchedly inhospitable ; but he thought on, and that great central 

 truth of astronomy developed in his mind ever more and more. To 

 publish it was dangerous indeed, and for thirty-six years it lay slum- 

 bering in the minds of Kopernik and the friends to whom he had 

 privately intrusted it. At last he prepares his great work on the 

 Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies, and dedicates it to the Pope 

 himself The work was intrusted to the scholar Osiander, of Nurem- 

 berg, to superintend its publication. But at the last moment the 

 courage of Osiander failed him. He dared not launch the new 

 thought boldly. He writes a groveling preface, endeavors to 

 excuse Kopernik for his novel idea. He inserts the apologetic lie 

 that Kopernik propounds the doctrine of the movement of the earth 

 not as a fact, but as a hypothesis. He declares that it is lawful for 

 an astronomer to indulge his imagination, and that this is what 

 Kopernik has done. Thus was the greatest and most ennobling, 

 perhaps, of scientific truths, a truth not less ennobling to religion 

 than to science, forced, in coming into the world, to sneak and crawL 

 On the 24th of May, 1543, the newly printed book first arrived at 

 the house of Kopernik. It was put into his hands, but he was on 

 his death-bed. A few hours later and he was beyond the reach of 

 fanatics and bigots, whose consciences would have blotted his repu- 



