Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/408

 from the mind of Cardinal de Cusa; but the chill of dogmatism was still over the earth, and up to the beginning of the sixteenth century there had come to this great truth neither bloom nor fruitage.

Quietly, however, the soil was receiving enrichment, and the air warmth. The processes of mathematics were constantly improved, the heavenly bodies were steadily though silently observed, and at length appeared, afar off from the centres of thought, on the borders of Poland, a plain, simple-minded scholar, who first fairly uttered to the world the truth, now so commonplace, then so astounding, that the sun and planets do not revolve about the earth, but that the earth and planets revolve about the sun, and that man was Nicholas Kopernik.

Kopernik had been a professor at Rome, but, as this truth grew within him, he seemed to feel that at Rome he was no longer safe.