opinion that the mass of mankind ought to be treated as mere machines.' A remark this which is applicable to not a few men who have been eminent for labors of a humane description, and which naturally gives rise to this other remark—that a good intellectual method, directed to practical ends, is often of more value to mankind than what is called a good heart.
NICOLAS COPERNICUS.
In the whole range of human science, no subject is calculated to excite
such sublime ideas as astronomy; and to its study, therefore, the greatest
minds have been directed both in ancient and modern times. Ancient,
however, as are the investigations into the relations of the heavenly bodies,
a correct idea of the planetary system was scarcely known before the sixteenth
century of the Christian era. The theory generally received on
that subject by the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, and other ancient nations,
and which continued predominant till a comparatively recent period,
described the earth as the center of all bodies occupying space, while the
Moon, Venus, Mercury, the Sun, the planets, and the stars, revolved
around it on a succession of solid spheres, at different distances, and at different
rates of speed, so as to produce the appearances which are daily
and nightly presented to our eyes in the heavens. Six centuries before
the commencement of our era, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and other Grecian
philosophers, had conceived some faint notion of a more correct system;
but when they ventured to suggest that the sun was a fixed body,
and that the earth was only one of a set of planets moving round it, they
experienced so much persecution on account of the inconsistency of their
doctrines with the religious ideas of the people, that they failed to establish
their theory on a permanent basis. When learning and the arts revived
in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some attention was
paid in the universities to astronomy; but the system taught was no better
than that which Aristotle, Ptolemy, and other ancient astronomers had
sanctioned, and which represented the sun and planets as moving round
the earth. The time at length arrived for the revival of the correct notions
entertained by Anaximander and Pythagoras.
Nicolas Copernicus, the modern to whom the honor of reviving that doctrine is due, was born, February 19, 1473, at Thorn, on the Vistula—a place now included in the dominions of the king of Prussia. The father of Copernicus was a native of Westphalia, a part of Germany: he had chanced to settle at Thorn, as a surgeon, about ten years before the birth of his son. Young Copernicus was educated for the profession of medicine at the university of Cracow; but his favorite studies were mathematics, perspective, astronomy, and painting. At an early age, inspired by an eager wish to distinguish himself in astronomy, he proceeded to Italy, and studied that science at the university of Bologna. It is supposed that a discovery of his teacher Dominic Maria, respecting the changes of the axis of the earth, was what first awakened his mind to the errors of the planetary system then taught. From Bologna he proceeded to Rome, where for some time he taught mathematics with great success—pursuing all the while, as far as circumstances would permit, his astronomical observations.
When he afterwards returned to his native country, his maternal uncle,
