belief attributed a more powerful action of certain drugs to special planetary conjunctions. Every zodiacal constellation had its peculiar influence on a certain part of the body. The effects of remedies depended upon the position of the moon in the zodiac.

It is assumed that because Copernicus copied more than once a prescription whose numerous and varied ingredients would remind one of the contents of the witches' cauldron, he therefore probably used it. I doubt the correctness of this inference. I fancy the remarkable prescription was kept as a curio with which to regale his friends, all of whom, no doubt, could appreciate a joke. Moreover, whatever the nature of his prescriptions, the patients of Copernicus had a happy habit of making a good recovery.

It helps if a man or woman is born at the right time. During the youth of Copernicus, whether unnoticed or acclaimed by the thunders of fame, many personal forces were beginning to move the world. Gutenberg (1398-1468) had introduced his movable plates and printing press. The Tudor period had begun in England. The stormy period of the Medici in Florence was for the moment tranquilized under the beneficent tyranny of Lorenzo the Magnificent, that notable patron of art and letters. Michelangelo and Leonardo painted their wonderful frescoes and chiseled the forms of their genius out of stone while Savonarola thundered his eloquent warnings from the pulpit of San Marco. In the midst of it all Martin Luther stood in the Diet of Worms solemnly declaring: "Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders." All the while civilization was under the mighty spell of that outstanding fact, that Columbus had broken through the last barrier of the old world and found a new hemisphere.

Before this great seething cauldron of the new age-the new learning, the new navigation, the new religion-stood Copernicus, as resurgent as any.

We are too ready to regard the ancients as crude without any other reason than the fact that they were ancient. The Hebrew poetry pictured a four-cornered flat earth around which a spherical star-studded sky revolved. Pythagoras, Philolaus, Anaxagoras, Hietatis and others had spoken of the round earth and other spheres, making many prophetic guesses at the truth, and often very nearly hitting the mark. The system described by Ptolemy

in his Almagest was very complicated, requiring more than sixty circles to explain it, but it was very cleverly worked out. Based on what was known by astronomers at the time, the Ptolemaic scheme was most ingenious. It had been accepted for nearly fourteen centuries and was hard to supplant.

Some minds are hospitable to complexity. Others demand the simplicity of generalization. The former is often dominated by detail, the latter by law or principle. But complexity is nearly always somewhere involved within the generalization no matter how true the principle may be. To our finite minds, some details seem ever to remain unexplained. Perhaps he is happiest who can with simple faith accept the thought of

"One law, one faith, one element,

And one far off divine event

To which the whole creation moves."

The heliocentric system was not a complete explanation of the heavens. Copernicus failed to divine the elliptical orbit and had still to resort to thirty-four epicycles to explain his view. It remained for Kepler to introduce the discovery of the ellipse before supreme order could be said to reign in our mathematical concept. of the skies.

Returning to our story, we find Copernicus, having studied at three universities (Cracow, Bologna, Padua), receiving his degree at a fourth, in the episcopal palace at Ferrara in 1503. After two further years in Italy, at thirty-two years of age, he returned to Ermland and engaged in political life, as the records of certain assemblages show. By resolution of the chapter dated January 7, 1507, he was appointed permanent physician to the bishop, at whose episcopal residence, the castle of Heilsberg, he remained a member of the household till his uncle's death in 1512.

Heilsberg is 46 miles from Frauenburg. From the rather formidable looking castle walls are seen the rivers Alle and Simser, which wind their tortuous courses till lost in extensive forests of oak and beech with which the country is well wooded. Heilsberg Castle in those days was like the stronghold of a mediaeval prince. The open court was thronged with a motley crowd of ecclesiastics, pages, servingmen, jugglers, minstrels, clowns, and other retainers. The times were perilous. The bishop's charge was no sinecure.

Messengers were constantly bringing tidings of some new outrage; grave churchmen with weighty spiritual matters sought their solution; young noblemen with ambitions, and mendicants with their humbler plaints sought help of the good bishop. Every sort of society was represented in this throng.

At noon a great bell tolled the signal for the midday meal. Thereupon, a procession led by the bishop in full choir-costume, attended by vicar, chief justice, chaplain, chamberlain, marshal, guests and retainers in order, led the way through the courtyard, to the great banqueting hall. Eight tables were spread; for, of the eight different degrees of dignity, each had his place fixed by authority. The buffoons and jugglers occupied a conspicuous central position so that all might enjoy their sallies.

For six years, Copernicus was daily a member of this procession. and assemblage. As days and months passed, he must have shared more and more, at first as confidante, and later, no doubt, as occasional adviser, the burdens, anxieties and obligations of the government of Ermland with which his uncle, the bishop was charged. The latter was at once prince of the empire and vassal of Poland. He was, ex officio, a member of the Polish senate and vice-regent of the Polish king in west Prussia. Poland and Prussia each sought his defence against any encroachments on its rights by the aggressive action of the other.

Ermland was the only one of four Prussian dioceses which preserved its independence. Thus the bishop of Ermland ruled a little state. He was required to conciliate, and yet hold in check, three neighbours, all mutually hostile, some of them powerful and ambitious, all restless, and one of them, at least, discontented. Thus the task of the bishop was almost an impossible one. Besides, Watzelrode was not much of a politician. He had energy and probity, but was strenuous without being supple and resourceful. Though his designs were all admirable and well-meant, they generally failed.

Copernicus and his uncle were seldom apart. They not only dwelt together, they travelled together. When the bishop went abroad to Petrikau, to Thorn, to Cracow, to diets, conferences, or royal solemnities, his nephew was his trusted companion. On the occasion of one of these journeys prolonged for two months,

Copernicus found time to translate from the Greek of Theophylactus Simoncatta, a Byzantine writer, the first work of a Greek author to be printed in Poland. This was published in Cracow. Dr. Leopold Prowe thinks the work betrays more enthusiasm for Greek culture than of proficiency in Greek scholarship. We should not forget that classic Greek was still a language little known, and possibly the only persons in the north who knew more of it than Copernicus were the famous trio of Oxford.*

It was during his residence in the castle of Heilsberg that Copernicus laid the foundations of his new thought of a heliocentric astronomy. While he was in Padua, the theories of Pythagoras had been freely discussed, and his mind had been opened to a keener scrutiny of the accepted teaching of his day. It is difficult for us to realize how interesting the Pythagoreans must have been to those who first questioned the canons of Ptolemy. To these ancients, the planets, the moon, and the spheres all revolved around a central fire from which the sun received its light and reflected it on us. They had learned that the light of the moon was reflected. They supposed that the sciences of music and of numbers were intimately involved in the movements of the heavenly luminaries. They combined their astronomical and their musical systems in the celebrated teaching of "the music of the spheres". The velocities of the moving bodies depended upon their distances from their central fire, the slower and nearer bodies giving out a deeper, and the swifter a higher note. Meanwhile we cannot hear sphere music because we hear it always and are never in a position to contrast it with silence.

While by no means accepting all the Pythagorean doctrines, Copernicus acknowledged that they gave him his first hint of the true hypothesis. He returned from Italy with a mind which could never again accept the geocentric as opposed to the heliocentric system. His own conception as presented in De Revolutionibus seems to have been, in the first place, an inspiration from the Greeks rather than the result of observations. These latter, he hardly began to make till 1513, after his return to Frauenburg, and he was never a very accurate observer, accuracy not being necessary for his larger purpose.

*More, Colet and Erasmus.

In March 1512, the bishop was bidden to the wedding-feast of the King of Poland. Copernicus accompanied, but for some unknown reason did not return to Heilsberg with his uncle. The bishop was taken ill on his way home and died three days after his arrival, at the age of 64 years. This was on March 29, 1512. Andreas, the brother of Copernicus, was seized meanwhile with leprosy and died before 1519.

Upon the death of his uncle, Copernicus returned to Frauenburg, and though he never took orders as a priest, he administered the functions of his office, whether sacred or secular, with conscientious diligence and dignity. His stipend was equal to $2,250. This with the income from another source, for he was also commissary of the diocese of Ermland, was sufficient to maintain in easy financial circumstances one with his simple tastes.

Through the dust and clouds of four centuries we see again the cathedral of Frauenburg with its six towers surrounded by walls and bastions rising from a commanding eminence near the town. Externally somewhat frowning, it has a restful interior. A monument has been erected in the cathedral bearing the inscription:

Astronomo celeberrimo, cujus nomen gloria utrumque implevit orbem.

The administrative duties of Copernicus were somewhat harassing. The conflict of the new learning with the old was raging, and its battles, we are told, did not always end without bloodshed, being complicated with political, racial and national animosities such as still disturb the peace of central Europe. Doubtless Copernicus held himself as aloof as possible from these unseemly disorders, but he had a great admiration for classical antiquity which set him fairly with those who furthered the revival of learning. Nevertheless, his mind was independent, being animated, but not enslaved, by its classical enthusiasms.

We may be sure that, amid all his worries, Copernicus was not careless of his dream. His soul was too much exalted in its vision, his spirit too fine in its fibre, to permit his ordinary duties, either temporal or ecclesiastical, to dim to darkness the rays of his life's central luminary. All permanent progress is made, all great achievements are consummated as a result of clear thinking and intense feeling.