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§§ 94, 95] tables naturally had great weight in inducing the astronomical world gradually to recognise the merits of the Coppernican system, at any rate as a basis for calculating the places of the Celestial bodies.

Reinhold was unfortunately cut off by the plague in 1553, and with him disappeared a commentary on the De Revolutionibus which he had prepared but not published.

95. Very soon afterwards we find the first signs that the Coppernican system had spread into England. In 1556 John Field published an almanack for the following year avowedly based on Coppernicus and Reinhold, and a passage in the Whetstone of Witte (1557) by Robert Recorde (1510–1558), our first writer on algebra, shews that the author regarded the doctrines of Coppernicus with favour, even if he did not believe in them entirely. A few years later Thomas Digges (?–1595), in his Alae sive Scalae Mathematicae (1573), an astronomical treatise of no great importance, gave warm praise to Coppernicus and his ideas.

96. For nearly half a century after the death of Reinhold no important contributions were made to the Coppernican controversy. Reinhold's tables were doubtless slowly doing their work in familiarising men's minds with the new ideas, but certain definite additions to knowledge had to be made before the evidence, for them could be regarded as really conclusive.

The serious mechanical difficulties connected with the assumption of a rapid motion of the earth which is quite imperceptible to its inhabitants could only be met by further progress in mechanics, and specially in knowledge of the laws according to which the motion of bodies is produced, kept up, changed, or destroyed; in this direction no considerable progress was made before the time of Galilei, whose work falls chiefly into the early 17th century (cf. chapter, §§ 116, 130, 133).

The objection to the Coppernican scheme that the stars shewed no such apparent annual motions as the motion of the earth should produce (chapter, § 92) would also be either answered or strengthened according as improved methods of observation did or did not reveal the required motion.

Moreover the Prussian Tables, although more accurate