Page:Edinburgh Review Volume 158.djvu/332

1883. Prowe's Life of Copernicus. 317 combined with a single remark of Rheticus, that he had no sooner begun to examine the contradictory teachings of the schools, and to compare them with what was visible in the skies, than he conceived a profound distrust of the prevalent systems. With ideas thus loosened from their foundations — animo liber, as Kepler said of him — he went to Italy, and there heard much of the so-called Pythagorean tenets as to the celestial revolutions. He resolved to examine for himself, unsealed the fount of rejuvenescent knowledge with the help of Codrus Urceus and the scanty Greek vocabulary of the monk Chrestonius, read eagerly, thought deeply, and at last, invoking antiquity against antiquity, Samos and Sicily against Alexandria, threw off the yoke which Ptolemy had imposed upon forty generations. The main lines of his immortal work were laid down at Heilsberg during the years 1506-12. The still more laborious task remained of testing the novel theory by comparison with observations, old and new, of patiently trying it with the facts it was designed to fit, of altering and amending where discrepancies became visible.

At Frauenburg, Copernicus may be said to have first begun systematically to note and record the places of the heavenly bodies. He chose for his observatory and abode a tower still pointed out to visitors as the ' curia Copernicana.' It formed part of the fortifications by which the ecclesiastical citadel of Ermland was (as the event proved) not altogether ineffectually protected, and overlooked a spacious horizon to the north, south, and west. The Cathedral of Frauenburg stood on a gentle eminence close to the 'Frische Haff,' an extensive sheet of nearly fresh water, connected with the Baltic by a single narrow channel, and separated from it by a ridge of blown sand known as the 'Nehrung.' From a species of terrace adjacent to the 'Copernican tower,' the eye wandered undisturbed across the blue expanse of this species of inland sea (327 square miles in area) to the white dunes beyond, and, in clear weather, even to the azure line of the Baltic ; while on the landward side a faintly undulating plain stretched south as far as the eye could see, well wooded and watered, rich with cornfields and meadows, and enlivened by cheerful homesteads ;