Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/758

 652 Otitlines of European History regions the population was reduced by one half, in others to a third, or even less, of what it had been at the opening of the conflict. The flourishing city of Augsbuig was left with but sixteen thousand souls instead of eighty thousand. The people were fearfully barbarized by privation and suffering and by the atrocities of the soldiers of all the various nations. Until the end of the eighteenth century Germany remained too exhausted and impoverished to make any considerable contribution to the culture of Europe. The new science The dis- covery of Copernicus Section 114. The Beginnings of our Scientific Age The battles of the Thirty Years' War are now well-nigh forgot, and few people are interested in Tilly and Wallenstein and Gus- tavus Adolphus. It seems as if the war did little but destroy men's lives and property, and that no great ends were accom- plished by all the suffering it involved. But during the years that it raged certain men were quietly devoting themselves to scientific research which was to change the world more than all the battles that have ever been fought. These men adopted a new method. They perceived that the books of ancient writers, especially Aristotle, which were used as textbooks in the univer- sities, were full of statements that could not be proved. They maintained that the only way to advance science was to set to work and try experiments, and by careful thought and investi- gation to determine the laws of nature without regard to what previous generations had thought. The Polish astronomer Copernicus published a work in 1543 in which he refuted the old idea that the sun and all the stars revolved around the earth as a center, as was then taught in all the universities. He showed that, on the contrary, the sun was the center about which the earth and the rest of the planets revolved, and that the reason that the stars seem to go around the earth each day is because our globe revolves on its axis. Although Copernicus had been encouraged to write his