Hipparchus and Ptolemy, it did not find a single important
champion for more than a thousand years after the time of the
last great Alexandrian astronomer.

The first man, seemingly, to hark back to the Aristarchian
conception in the new scientific era that was now dawning was the
noted cardinal, Nikolaus of Cusa, who lived in the first half of
the fifteenth century, and was distinguished as a philosophical
writer and mathematician. His De Docta Ignorantia expressly
propounds the doctrine of the earth's motion. No one, however,
paid the slightest attention to his suggestion, which, therefore,
merely serves to furnish us with another interesting illustration
of the futility of propounding even a correct hypothesis before
the time is ripe to receive it--particularly if the hypothesis is
not fully fortified by reasoning based on experiment or
observation.

The man who was destined to put forward the theory of the earth's
motion in a way to command attention was born in 1473, at the
village of Thorn, in eastern Prussia. His name was Nicholas
Copernicus. There is no more famous name in the entire annals of
science than this, yet posterity has never been able fully to
establish the lineage of the famous expositor of the true
doctrine of the solar system. The city of Thorn lies in a
province of that border territory which was then under control of
Poland, but which subsequently became a part of Prussia. It is
claimed that the aspects of the city were essentially German, and
it is admitted that the mother of Copernicus belonged to that
race. The nationality of the father is more in doubt, but it is
urged that Copernicus used German as his mother-tongue. His great