§ 22), but he declined to give any advice on the ground that the motions of the sun and moon were as yet too imperfectly known for a satisfactory reform to be possible. A few years later (1524) he wrote an open letter, intended for publication, to one of his Cracow friends, in reply to a tract on precession, in which, after the manner of the time, he used strong language about the errors of his opponent.[1]
It was meanwhile gradually becoming known that he held the novel doctrine that the earth was in motion and the sun and stars at rest, a doctrine which was sufficiently startling to attract notice outside astronomical circles. About 1531 he had the distinction of being ridiculed on the stage at some popular performance in the neighbourhood; and it is interesting to note (especially in view of the famous persecution of Galilei at Rome a century later) that Luther in his Table Talk frankly described Coppernicus as a fool for holding such opinions, which were obviously contrary to the Bible, and that Melanchthon, perhaps the most learned of the Reformers, added to a somewhat similar criticism a broad hint that such opinions should not be tolerated. Coppernicus appears to have taken no notice of these or similar attacks, and still continued to publish nothing. No observation made later than 1529 occurs in his great book, which seems to have been nearly in its final form by that date; and to about this time belongs an extremely interesting paper, known as the Commentariolus, which contains a short account of his system of the world, with some of the evidence for it, but without any calculations. It was apparently written to be shewn or lent to friends, and was not published; the manuscript disappeared after the death of the author and was only rediscovered in 1878. The Commentariolus was probably the basis of a lecture on the ideas of Coppernicus given in 1533 by one of the Roman astronomers at the request of Pope Clement VII. Three years later Cardinal Schomberg wrote to ask Coppernicus for further information as to his views, the letter showing that the chief features were already pretty accurately known.
- ↑ Nullo demum loco ineptior est quam . . . ubi nimis pueriliter hallucinatur: Nowhere is he more foolish than . . . where he suffers from delusions of too childish a character.
